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praise for
A History of Iran

“[A] beautiful distilled retelling of Iranian history that flashes with

insight on every page. A writer and lecturer on contemporary Iran who
formerly headed the Iran desk at the Foreign Office, [Axworthy]
begins at the beginning and tells a very good story.”
—Financial Times

“[A History of Iran] does provide a wonderfully engaging and informative

introduction to Iranian history. This work celebrates the vital impor-
tance of storytelling for Iranians in teaching about their own history
and culture, upon which it sheds so much useful light.”
—Middle East Journal

“In A History of Iran, Michael Axworthy, a lecturer in Arabic and Is-

lamic Studies at the University of Exeter, UK, provides a clear, swift-
moving narrative, detailed but not cluttered, that takes the reader
briskly down the highway (and more significant byways) of two and a
half millennia of Persian history. . . . It is hard to imagine a better treat-
ment of Persia within a single volume than this.” —Foreword

“A fine discussion of Iranian progress and a top pick for any library
strong in Middle Eastern studies.” —Midwest Book Review

“[Axworthy’s] work provides considerable insight into how the country

got where it is today and useful context for understanding the some-
times alarming comments of its current leaders. On that basis alone,
‘Empire of the Mind’ is well worth reading for anyone who’s interested
in Middle Eastern affairs and their impact on the rest of the world.”
—Charleston Post & Courier
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“Michael Axworthy is a lover of things Persian: their history as one of

the oldest continuing civilizations in the world, their poetry, their
modern cinema and so on. Axworthy, in his book, A History of Iran,
understands Iran as both an empire of the mind (a deeper, humane,
reflective Iran) and a revolutionary Islamic empire with a heightened
sense of its own uniqueness.” —Jewish Herald Voice

“Inviting us to look beyond the menacing bluster of the Iranian presi-

dent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Axworthy celebrates Iran’s rich history
of tolerance and creative expression.”
—The Chronicle of Higher Education

“[Axworthy] has written a compact but still inclusive narrative account

that conveys both the diversity and richness of the various empires and
cultural forces that have shaped the Iranian people. . . . This is an excel-
lent examination of the forging of a people who are poised to, once
again, play a prominent role in world affairs.” —Booklist

“Michael Axworthy has crafted a concise history of a country that has

captured the imagination of the world for several millennia.”
—The Roanoke Times

“Exceptionally lucid, intriguing and informative. . . . Without rose-

glasses or narrowed eyes, without being an apologist or a zealot oppo-
nent, Axworthy presents a history by turns thrilling, cautionary,
inspiring and surprising.” —Scotland on Sunday (UK)

“At this time above all, we need a deeply informed, engagingly written
history of the nation from Cyrus to Khomeini and beyond. Axworthy
does the job with balance and aplomb. Readers who fear that they may
shrink in confusion will warm to his human-scale portrait of a self-
renewing culture that, as with its world-beating cinema today, shows
‘enduring greatness’ and ‘creative power.’” —Belfast Telegraph
0465019205-text_Layout 1 12/28/09 5:48 PM Page iii

A History of

IRAN Empire of the Mind

Michael Axworthy

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

New York
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Copyright © 2008 by Michael Axworthy

Hardcover edition first published in 2008 by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Paperback edition first published in 2010 by Basic Books

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be repro-
duced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue
South, New York, NY 10016-8810.

Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United
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Designed by Timm Bryson

Set in 12 point Adobe Jenson by the Perseus Books Group

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Axworthy, Michael.
A history of Iran : empire of the mind / Michael Axworthy.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-465-00888-9 (alk. paper)
1. Iran—History. I. Title.

DS272.A94 2008
955—dc22
2007049157

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-465-01920-5

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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To my wife Sally
Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan
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Contents

Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv

1 Origins: Zoroaster, the Achaemenids,

and the Greeks 1

2 The Iranian Revival: Parthians

and Sassanids 31

3 Islam and Invasions: The Arabs, Turks,

and Mongols—The Iranian Reconquest
of Islam, the Sufis, and the Poets 67

4 Shi‘ism and the Safavids 123

5 The Fall of the Safavids, Nader Shah, the

Eighteenth-Century Interregnum, and the
Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 145

6 The Crisis of the Qajar Monarchy,

the Revolution of 1905–1911, and
the Accession of the Pahlavi Dynasty 185

vii
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viii Contents

7 The Pahlavis and the

Revolution of 1979 221

8 Iran Since the Revolution: Islamic

Revival, War, and Confrontation 259

9 From Khatami to Ahmadinejad, and

the Iranian Predicament 283

Epilogue 295

Notes 303
Select Bibliography 323
Index 333
0465019205-text_Layout 1 12/28/09 5:48 PM Page ix

. . . However, when I began to consider the reasons for these opinions, all
these reasons given for the magnificence of human nature failed to con-
vince me: that man is the intermediary between creatures, close to the
gods, master of all the lower creatures, with the sharpness of his senses, the
acuity of his reason, and the brilliance of his intelligence, the interpreter of
nature, the nodal point between eternity and time, and, as the Persians
say, the intimate bond or marriage song of the world, just a little lower
than angels, as David tells us. I concede these are magnificent reasons, but
they do not seem to go to the heart of the matter. . . .
. . . Euanthes the Persian . . . writes that man has no inborn, proper form,
but that many things that humans resemble are outside and foreign to
them: “Man is multitudinous, varied, and ever changing.” Why do I em-
phasize this? Considering that we are born with this condition, that is,
that we can become whatever we choose to become, we need to understand
that we must take earnest care about this, so that it will never be said to
our disadvantage that we were born to a privileged position but failed to
realize it and became animals and senseless beasts. . . . Above all, we
should not make that freedom of choice God gave us into something harm-
ful, for it was intended to be to our advantage. Let a holy ambition enter
into our souls; let us not be content with mediocrity, but rather strive after
the highest and expend all our strength in achieving it.
—Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man
(translated by Richard Hooker)
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0465019205-text_Layout 1 12/28/09 5:48 PM Page xi

Preface
The Remarkable Resilience of the Idea of Iran

Har kas ke bedanad va bedanad ke bedanad

Asb-e kherad az gombad-e gardun bejahanad
Har kas ke nadanad va bedanad ke nadanad
Langan kharak-e khish be manzel beresanad
Har kas ke nadanad va nadanad ke nadanad
Dar jahl-e morakkab ‘abad od-dahr bemanad

Anyone who knows, and knows that he knows,

Makes the steed of intelligence leap over the vault of heaven.
Anyone who does not know, but knows that he does not know,
Can bring his lame little donkey to the destination nonetheless.
Anyone who does not know, and does not know that he does not know
Is stuck for ever in double ignorance
(Anonymous, attributed to Naser od-Din Tusi (1201–1274);
anticipating Donald Rumsfeld by perhaps seven centuries)

Iranian history is full of violence and drama—invasions, conquerors, bat-

tles, and revolutions. Because Iran has a longer history than most countries,
and is bigger than many, there is more of this drama. But there is more to
Iranian history than that. There are religions, influences, intellectual move-
ments, and ideas that have changed things within Iran, but also outside
Iran and around the world. Today Iran demands attention again, and the
new situation poses questions: Is Iran an aggressive power, or a victim? Is

xi
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xii Preface

Iran traditionally expansionist, or traditionally passive and defensive? Is the

Shi‘ism of Iran quietist, or violent and revolutionary? Only history can sug-
gest answers to those questions. Iran is one of the world’s oldest civilizations,
and has been among the world’s most thoughtful and complex civilizations
from the very beginning. There are aspects of Iranian civilization that, in one
way or another, have touched almost every human being on the planet. But
the story of how that happened, and the full significance of those influences,
is often unknown and forgotten.
Iran is replete with paradoxes, contradictions, and exceptions. Most non-
Iranians think of it as a country of hot deserts, but it is ringed with high,
cold mountains. It has rich agricultural provinces, and others full of lush
subtropical forests. Reflecting its wide climatic variations, Iran has a diverse
and colorful range of flora and fauna. Between Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia
and the Persian Gulf, Iranians speak an Indo-European language in the
midst of the Arabic-speaking Middle East. Iran is commonly thought of as a
homogeneous nation, with a strong national culture, but minorities like the
Azeris, Kurds, Gilakis, Baluchis, and Turkmen make up nearly half the pop-
ulation. Since the 1979 revolution, Iranian women have been subject to one
of the most restrictive dress codes in the Islamic world, yet partly in conse-
quence, Iranian families have released their daughters to study and work in
unprecedented numbers. More than sixty percent of students entering uni-
versity now are female, and many women—even married women—have
professional jobs.
Iran has preserved some of the most stunning Islamic architecture in the
world, as well as traditions of artisan metalworking, rug making, and bazaar
trading: a complex and sophisticated urban culture. And yet its capital,
Tehran, has slowly smothered itself in concrete, traffic congestion, and pol-
lution. Iranians glory in their literary heritage and above all in their poetry,
to a degree one finds in few other countries, with the possible exception of
Russia. Many Iranians can recite lengthy passages from their favorite poems,
and phrases from the country’s great poets are common in everyday speech.
It is poetry that insistently dwells on the joys of life—themes of wine,
beauty, flowers, and sexual love. And yet Iran also has an intense popular tra-
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Preface xiii

dition of Shi‘ism, which in the mourning month of Moharram (when Shi‘

Muslims mourn the death of the Emam Hosein) emerges in religious pro-
cessions dominated by a mood of gloom, and a powerful sense of betrayal
and injustice. Iran’s religious culture also encompasses the world’s most for-
bidding, censorious, and dogmatic Shi‘a Muslim clerics. It is an Islamic
republic, but one in which only 1.4 percent of the population attends Friday
prayers.
One thing is best explained at the start—another apparent paradox. Iran
and Persia are the same country. The image conjured up by the name Persia is
one of romance—roses and nightingales in elegant gardens, fast horses, flirta-
tious women, sharp sabers, jewel-colored carpets, melodious music. But in the
cliché of Western media presentation, the name Iran conjures a rather differ-
ent image—frowning mullahs, black oil, women’s blanched faces peering from
under dark chadors, grim crowds burning flags, chanting “death to. . . .”
In the south of Iran there is a province called Fars. Its capital is Shiraz
and the province contains Iran’s most ancient and impressive archaeological
sites, Persepolis and Pasargadae (along with Susa, in neighboring Khuzes-
tan). In ancient times the province was called Pars, after the people who had
settled there—the Persians. When those people created an empire that
dominated the whole region, the Greeks called it the Persian Empire. Later,
the term Persia was applied by the Greeks, Romans, and other Europeans to
all the dynastic states that followed in that region—the territory that is Iran
today: Sassanid Persia in the centuries before the Islamic conquest, Safavid
Persia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Qajar Persia in the nine-
teenth century. But all through that time the people of those empires called
themselves Iranians, and their land Iran. The word derives from the very ear-
liest times, apparently meaning “noble.” It is cognate both with a similar word
in Sanskrit, and with the term “Aryan”—the word used and abused in the
racial ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1
In 1935 Reza Shah, wanting to distance his state from the decadent, inef-
fectual Qajar government he had displaced, instructed his embassies over-
seas to require foreign governments henceforth to call the country Iran in
official communications. But many people, including some Iranians outside
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xiv Preface

Iran, still prefer the term Persia because it retains the ancient, often happier,
connotations. My practice is to use both terms, but with a preference for Iran
when dealing with the period after 1935, and for Persia for the preceding cen-
turies, when it was the word used for the country by English-speakers. Irani-
ans themselves call their language Farsi because it originated in the Iranian
dialect spoken in Fars province. The language is now spoken not just in Iran
but also extensively in Tajikistan; in Afghanistan (as the Dari dialect); and it
has had a strong influence on the Urdu language spoken in Pakistan and
northern India. In the earlier chapters of this book, the term Iranian is used
also to cover the non-Persian peoples and languages of the wider region, like
the Parthians, Sogdians, and Medes.
There are many books available on contemporary Iran, and on earlier
periods of Iranian history. Several cover the whole history of Iran from the
earliest times—notably the monumental seven-volume Cambridge History of
Iran, and the huge project of the Encyclopedia Iranica (the latter is as yet in-
complete but nonetheless incomparable for the range and depth of knowl-
edge of Iranian history it pulls together—and much more than history).
This book does not attempt to compete with those, but tries rather to pres-
ent an introduction to the history of Iran for a general readership, assuming
little or no prior knowledge. In addition it aims to explain some of the para-
doxes and contradictions through the history—probably the only way that
they can be properly understood. And beyond that—especially in Chapter
3, which explores some of the treasury of classical Persian poetry—it at-
tempts to give the beginnings of an insight into the way the intellectual and
literary culture of Iran developed, and has had a wider influence, not just in
the Middle East, Central Asia, and India, but throughout the world.
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Acknowledgments

The title of this book, if not the idea of it altogether, is unusual in that it
originated at a public event—a panel discussion in front of an invited au-
dience, arranged to inaugurate the Forgotten Empire exhibition at the
British Museum in the autumn of 2005. The panel was chaired by the
journalist Jon Snow and included the Iranian ambassador, Seyyed Mo-
hammad Hossein Adeli (recalled to Tehran shortly afterward), Haleh Af-
shar of York University, Ali Ansari from the University of St. Andrews,
and Christopher de Bellaigue, author of In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs.
Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, made an introduc-
tory presentation.
The discussion ranged widely but centered on the question of continuity
in Iranian history, and on the enduring power of the idea of Iran, the influ-
ence of its literary and court culture on the other powers and linguistic cul-
tures of the region, and its resilience over millennia despite war, invasion,
religious change, and revolution. Then Jon Snow asked the audience to put
questions to the panel. I asked a question toward the end—to the effect that
if, as members of the panel had suggested, the center of Iranian culture had
moved at different times from Fars in southern Iran to Mesopotamia, to
Khorasan in the northeast and Central Asia, and to what is now called
Azerbaijan in the northwest; and given its strong influence far beyond the
land of Iran itself, into Abbasid Baghdad and Ottoman Turkey, for example,
on the one side and into Central Asia and Moghul India on the other; then

xv
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xvi Acknowledgments

perhaps we should set aside our usual categories of nationhood and imperial
culture and think instead of Iran as an Empire of the Mind? The panel
seemed to like this suggestion, and someone in the audience called out that
it would make a good book. So, here it is.
I have benefited greatly from the generous help and advice of a number
of people, especially Baqer Moin, Ali Ansari, Willem Floor, Sajjad Rizvi,
Lenny Lewisohn, Hashem Ahmadzadeh, Chris Rundle, Touraj Daryaee,
Michael Grenfell, Peter Melville, Duncan Head, Haideh Sahim, and
Mahdi Dasht-Bozorgi, Gary Sick, Luciano Zaccara, Rudi Matthee, Anna
Paaso, and one anonymous reviewer, who read all or part of it in advance of
publication; but also my father Ifor Axworthy and my sister Janet Axwor-
thy, Peter Avery, Frances Cloud, Gordon Nechvatal, Shaghayegh Azimi,
Paul Luft, and Paul Auchterlonie, as well as the other staff at the University
Library in Exeter, and at the London Library. I should also thank my other
friends and colleagues in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies in Ex-
eter for their help and support, especially Tim Niblock, Rasheed El-Enany,
Gareth Stansfield, James Onley, and Rob Gleave, as well as Michael Dwyer
(simply the best editor it has been my good fortune to encounter), Maria
Petalidou, and their colleagues at Hurst; Lara Heimert at Basic Books; Jim
Morgan; my agent Georgina Capel; and (not just last but not least this
time) my wife Sally for her unfailing cheerfulness and encouragement.

The author and publisher wish to thank the following for kindly agreeing
to reproduce copyrighted material included in this book. Penguin Books
Ltd., for permission to reproduce the quotations from Arthur Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon, © Penguin Books, 1969, and from The Conference of the
Birds, by Farid al-Din Attar, translated by A. Darbandi and D. Davis, © Pen-
guin Classics, 1984; Ibex Publishers, for permission to reproduce the poem
on p. 116 from A Thousand Years of Persian Rubaiyat, translated by Reza
Saberi, © Ibex Publishers, 2000; The University of Washington Press for
permission to reproduce the excerpt from The Tragedy of Sohrab and Rostam,
translated by J. W. Clinton, © The University of Washington Press, 1996.
0465019205-text_Layout 1 12/28/09 5:48 PM Page xvii

Acknowledgments xvii

Transliteration
The transliteration of names and other terms from Persian into English is
an awkward problem, and it is not possible to be fully consistent without
producing text that will sometimes look odd. As with my previous book, on
Nader Shah, I have used a transliteration scheme that leans toward modern
Iranian pronunciation, because I did not want to write a book on Iranian
history in which the names and places would read oddly to Iranians. But
there are inconsistencies, notably over the transliteration of names that have
had a life of their own in Western writing—Isfahan, Fatima, Sultan, mullah,
for example. Other, less justifiable inconsistencies, of which there will
doubtless be some, are in all cases my fault rather than that of those who
tried to advise me on the manuscript in its different stages of completion.
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0465019205-text_Layout 1 12/28/09 5:48 PM Page 1

1
Origins
Zoroaster, the Achaemenids, and the Greeks

O Cyrus . . . Your subjects, the Persians,

are a poor people with a proud spirit
—King Croesus of Lydia,
according to Herodotus

The history of Iran starts with a question: Who are the Iranians? The ques-
tion concerns not just the origins of Iran, but echoes, in one form or another,
in the history of the country and its people down to the present day.
The Iranians were one branch of the Indo-European family of peoples
who moved out of what are today the Russian steppes to settle in Europe,
Iran, Central Asia, and northern India, in a series of migrations and inva-
sions in the latter part of the second millennium bc. This explains the close
relationship between the Persian language and other Indo-European lan-
guages—particularly Sanskrit and Latin, but also modern languages like
Hindi, German, and English. Any speaker of a European language who is
learning Persian soon encounters a series of familiar words: pedar (father,
Latin pater); dokhtar (daughter, girl, German tochter); mordan (to die, Latin
mortuus, French mourir, le mort); nam (name); dar (door); and perhaps the
most familiar of all, the first-person present and singular of the verb to be,

1
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2 A History of Iran

the suffix—am (I am—as in the sentence “I am an Iranian”—Irani-am). An

English-speaker who has attempted to learn German will find Persian gram-
mar both familiar and blessedly simple by comparison. There are no genders
or grammatical cases for nouns. Persian, like English, has evolved since an-
cient times into a simplified form, dropping the heavily inflected grammar of
old Persian. It has no structural relationship with Arabic or the other Se-
mitic languages of the ancient Middle East (though it took in many Arab
words after the Arab conquest).
Long before the migrants who spoke Iranian languages arrived from the
north, there were other people living in what later became the land of Iran.
People lived on the Iranian plateau as early as 100,000 bc, in what is known
as the Old Stone Age, and by 5000 bc agricultural settlements were flour-
ishing in and around the Zagros mountains—the area to the east of the
great Sumerian civilization of Mesopotamia. Excavation of one of these
settlements, at Hajji Firoz Tepe, has produced the remains of the world’s
oldest-known wine jar, complete with grape residue and traces of resin that
were used as a flavoring and a preservative, indicating that the wine would
have tasted something like Greek retsina.1 Before and during the period of
the Iranian migrations, an empire—the empire of Elam—flourished in the
area that later became the provinces of Khuzestan and Fars, based in the
cities of Susa and Anshan. The Elamites spoke a language that was neither
Mesopotamian nor Iranian, but they were influenced by the Sumerians, As-
syrians, and Babylonians, and transmitted elements of their culture on to
the later Iranian dynasties. Elamite influence spread beyond the area usually
associated with its empire. An example of this is in Tepe Sialk, just south of
modern Kashan, where a ziggurat—an ancient Mesopotamian temple—
shows all the forms of an Elamite settlement. This ziggurat at Tepe Sialk
has been dated to around 2900 bc.
Recent DNA-based research in other countries has tended to emphasize
the relative stability of the genetic pool over time, despite conquests, migra-
tions, and what look from historical accounts to be mass settlements or even
genocides. It is likely that the Iranian settlers or conquerors were relatively
few in number, compared to the pre-existing peoples who later adopted their
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Origins 3

language and intermarried with them. And probably ever since that time,
down to the present day, the rulers of Iran have ruled over at least some non-
Iranian peoples. From the very beginning then, the Idea of Iran was as much
about culture and language—in all their complex patterns—as about race
or territory.
From the beginning there was always a division (albeit a fuzzy one) be-
tween Iran’s nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples and its settled, crop-growing
agriculturists. Iran is a land of great contrasts in climate and geography, and
in addition to areas of productive agricultural land (expanded by ingenious
use of irrigation from groundwater), there are more extensive areas of rugged
mountain and semi-desert, worthless for crops but suitable for grazing, even
if only for a limited period each year. Over these lands the nomads moved
their herds. The early Iranians seem to have herded cattle in particular.
In the pre-modern world, pastoralist nomads had many advantages over
settled peasant farmers. Their wealth was their livestock, which meant their
wealth was movable and they could escape from threats of violence with lit-
tle loss. Other nomads might attack them, of course, but peasant farmers
were always much more vulnerable. If threatened with violence at harvest
time, the farmers stood to lose the accumulated value of a full year’s work
and be left destitute. In peaceful times nomads were happy to trade meat
and wool with the peasants in exchange for grains and other crops, but the
nomads always had the option of adding direct coercion to purely eco-
nomic bargaining. Nomads have had the upper hand from the time the
Indo-European pastoralist Iranians first entered the Iranian plateau, right
up to the twentieth century.
From such circumstances a system of tribute—what the twentieth-century
Mafia would call protection—developed. The peasants paid a portion of
their harvest in order to be left alone. From another perspective, augmented
with a bit of presentational subtlety and tradition, this system could be called
government taxation. Most of the historical rulers of Iran originated from the
nomadic tribes (including from non-Iranian nomads who arrived in later
waves of migration), and animosity between the nomads and the settled pop-
ulation has persisted into modern times. The settled population (particularly
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4 A History of Iran

later, when towns and cities developed) regarded themselves as more civi-
lized, less violent, and less crude. But the nomads saw the settled population
as soft and devious, while considering themselves, by contrast, as hardy,
tough, and self-reliant, exemplifying a kind of rugged honesty. There would
have been elements of truth in both caricatures, but the attitudes of the early
Iranian elites partook especially of the latter.

Medes and Persians

The Iranian-speakers who migrated into the land of Iran and the surround-
ing area in the years before 1000 bc were not one single tribe or group. In
time some of their descendants became known as Medes and Persians, but
there were Parthians, Sogdians, and others, too, who only acquired the
names known to us later in their history. And even the titles Mede and Per-
sian were themselves simplifications, lumping together shifting alliances and
confederacies of disparate tribes.
From the beginning, the Medes and Persians are mentioned together in
historical sources, suggesting a close relationship from the very earliest
times. The first such mention is in an Assyrian record of 836 bc—an ac-
count of an extended military campaign by the Assyrian king Shalmaneser
III and several of his successors that was waged in the Zagros mountains
and as far east as Mount Demavand, the high, extinct volcano in the Alborz
range. The accounts they left behind listed the Medes and Persians as tribu-
taries—those paying tribute to the stronger Assyrians. The heartlands of
the Medes were in the northwest, in the modern provinces of Azerbaijan,
Kurdistan, Hamadan, and Tehran. In the region of the Zagros south of the
territories occupied by the Medes, the Assyrians encountered the Persians in
the region they called Parsuash, which has been known ever since as Pars or
Fars.2
Within a century or so, however, the Medes and Persians were fighting
back, attacking Assyrian territories. Later traditions recorded by Herodotus
in the fifth century bc mention early kings of the Medes, called Deioces and
Cyaxares, who appeared in the Assyrian accounts as Daiaukku and Uaksa-
0465019205-text_Layout 1 12/28/09 5:48 PM Page 5

Origins 5

tar; and a king of the Persians called Achaemenes, who the Assyrians called
Hakhamanish. By 700 bc the Medes—with the help of Scythian tribes—
had established an independent state, which later grew to become the first
Iranian Empire. In 612 bc the Medes destroyed the Assyrian capital, Nin-
eveh (adjacent to modern Mosul, on the Tigris). At its height the Median
Empire stretched from Asia Minor to the Hindu Kush, and south to the
Persian Gulf, ruling the Persians as vassals as well as many other subject
peoples.

The Prophet Who Laughed

But before the first mentions of the Iranians and their kings appear in the
records, another important historical figure lived—Zoroaster or Zarathu-
stra (modern Persian Zardosht). It is generally accepted that Zoroaster lived
and was not just a man of myth or legend. His dates are unknown and ex-
perts have disagreed radically about when he lived. Compared with Jesus,
Mohammad, or even Moses, Zoroaster is a much more indistinct figure.
Little is known for sure about his life—the best evidence suggests he lived
in the northeast, in what later became Bactria and later still, in Afghani-
stan. But another tradition has suggested he came from what is now Azer-
baijan, around the river Araxes. As a religious thinker and a key figure in
the history of world religions, Zoroaster certainly ranks in importance with
the other prophets. But for the same reason that the details of his life are
obscure, it is also difficult to establish the precise import of his teaching.
The Zoroastrian religious texts that are the main source for both (notably
the Avesta) were written down in the form they are known to us only much
later, in the Sassanid period.3 The stories about Zoroaster they contain are
little more than fables. Some of the stories correspond with information
from classical Greek and Latin commentators and show their genuine an-
tiquity. For example, there is the story that at birth the infant Zoroaster did
not cry, but laughed. And the theology combines what are undoubtedly an-
cient elements with innovations that were incorporated and developed
much later.
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6 A History of Iran

So although Zoroastrian tradition places Zoroaster’s birth at around 600

bc, most scholars now believe he lived earlier. It is still unclear just when, but
it is reasonable to think it was around 1200 or 1000 bc, at the time of, or
shortly after, the migrations of Iranian cattle herders to the Iranian plateau.
This view is based on the fact that the earliest texts (the Gathas, traditionally
considered to be hymns first sung by Zoroaster himself ) show significant
differences with the later liturgical language associated with the period
around 600 bc. Other clues come from the characteristics of the pastoral
way of life reflected in the texts, and the absence in them of references to the
Medes or Persians or the names of kings or other people known from that
later time.
It seems plausible that Zoroaster’s religious revelation arose in the con-
text of the changes, new demands, and new influences associated with the
migration, including the self-questioning of a culture faced with new neigh-
bors and unfamiliar pressures. The religion, then, was the result of an en-
counter with a new complexity. While it was to some extent a compromise
with that new complexity, it was also an attempt to govern it according to
new principles.
Other evidence supports the view that Zoroaster did not invent a religion
from nothing. Instead, he reformed and simplified pre-existing religious
practices (against some resistance from traditional priests), infusing them
with a much more sophisticated philosophical theology and a greater em-
phasis on morality and justice. This view is supported by the existence of an
early tradition that held writing to be alien and demonic—suggesting that
the Iranians associated it with the Semitic and other peoples among whom
they found themselves in the centuries after the migration.4 More evidence
that Zoroaster reformed pre-existing religions is that the Persian word
div—cognate with both Latin and Sanskrit words for the gods—in the
Zoroastrian context was used for a class of demons opposed to Zoroaster
and his followers, suggesting that the reforming prophet reclassified at least
some previous deities as evil spirits.5 The demons were associated with
chaos and disorder—the antithesis of the principles of goodness and justice
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Origins 7

represented by the new religion. At the more mundane level the demons also
lay behind diseases of people and animals, bad weather, and other natural
disasters.
At the center of Zoroaster’s theology was the opposition between Ahura
Mazda, the creator-god of truth and light, and Ahriman, the embodiment of
lies, darkness, and evil.6 This dualism became a persistent theme in Iranian
thought for centuries. Modern Zoroastrianism is much more strongly
monotheistic, and to make this distinction more explicit many scholars refer
to the religion in this early stage as Mazdaism. Other pre-existing deities
were incorporated into the Mazdaean religious structure as angels or
archangels—notably Mithra, a sun god, and Anahita, a goddess of streams
and rivers. Six Immortal archangels (the Amesha Spenta) embodied animal
life, plant life, metals and minerals, earth, fire, and water. The names of sev-
eral of these archangels—for example Bahman, Ordibehesht, Khordad—
survive as months in the modern Iranian calendar, even under the Islamic
republic. Ahura Mazda himself personified air, and in origin paralleled the
Greek Zeus, as a sky-god.
The modern Persian month Bahman is named after the Mazdaean
archangel Vohu Manu—the second in rank after Ahura Mazda, character-
ized as Good Purpose and identified with the cattle who were the second
class of beings to be created by Ahura Mazda, after man himself. Part of the
creation myth in Zoroastrianism holds that after all was created good by
Ahura Mazda, the evil spirit Ahriman (accompanied by six evil spirits
matching the six Immortals) assaulted creation, murdering the first man,
killing the sacred bull Vohu Manu, and polluting the pure elements of water
and fire. The importance of cattle to the nomadic early Iranians is shown by
the frequent appearance of bulls and cattle in sculpture and iconography
from the Achaemenid period—but many of these images may have a more
specific religious significance, referring to Vohu Manu.
The name Ahura Mazda means Lord of Wisdom, or Wise Lord. The
dualism went a long way toward resolving the problem of evil that presents
such difficulties for the monotheistic religions (the origin of evil in the
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8 A History of Iran

world was Ahriman, against whom Ahura Mazda struggled for supremacy)
and at least initially permitted a strong attachment to the ideas of free will
(arising out of the necessity of human beings choosing between good and
evil), goodness emerging in good actions, judgment after death, and heaven
and hell. Some scholars have suggested that within a few centuries (but be-
fore 600 bc) Mazdaism developed a theory of a Messiah—the Saoshyant,
who would be born miraculously at the end of time from a virgin mother
and the seed of Zoroaster himself.7 But the dualism implied other difficul-
ties, which emerged later. One was how Ahura Mazda and Ahriman them-
selves came into existence. To explain this, some later followers of the
Iranian religion believed in a creator-god, Zurvan (identified with Time or
Fate), who prayed for a son and was rewarded with twins. The twins became
Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. This branch of Mazdaism has been called
Zurvanism.
It was a characteristic of the new religion that philosophical concepts or
categories became personified as heavenly beings or entities—indeed these
seem to have proliferated, a little like characters in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress. One example is the idea of the daena. According to one later text, a
beautiful maiden appeared to the soul of a just man after his death. She was
the personification of all the good works he had done in life, and she said to
him,

For when, in the world, you saw someone sacrificing to the demon, you in-
stead started adoring God; and when you saw someone carrying out violence
and robbery and afflicting and despising good men and gathering in their sub-
stance with evil actions, you instead avoided treating creatures with violence
and robbery; you took care of the just and welcomed them and gave them
lodgings and gifts. Whether your wealth came from near or from afar, it was
honorably acquired. And when you saw people give false judgments and al-
lowed themselves to be corrupted with money and commit perjury, you in-
stead undertook to tell the truth and speak righteously. I am your righteous
thoughts, your righteous words, your righteous actions, thought, spoken, done
by you.8
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Origins 9

Elsewhere the word daena was used to signify religion itself. Another ex-
ample of personification in Mazdaism is the identification of five separate
entities belonging to each human being—not just body, soul, and spirit, but
also adhvenak and fravashi. Adhvenak, the heavenly prototype for each hu-
man being, was associated with semen and regeneration. The fravashi were
more active, associated with the strength of heroes, the protection of the liv-
ing in life (like guardian angels), and the collection of souls after death
(rather like the Valkyries in Germanic mythology). These and other person-
ifications prefigure the role of angels in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but
also have obvious connections to the idea of forms in Platonism. Many
scholars believe Plato was strongly influenced by Mazdaism.
Paralleling Ahura Mazda and Ahriman were two principles, sometimes
translated as good and evil but more precisely as Truth and the Lie—asha
and druj. These terms recur insistently in the Avestan texts, along with the
concept of justice. They also show up in surviving inscriptions (in old Per-
sian, the words became arta and drauga) and in Western classical texts de-
scribing Iran or events in Iran. In the centuries after Zoroaster, there were
different currents and separate sects within the Mazdaean tradition, repre-
senting both innovations and survivals from the pre-Zoroastrian religions,
as well as various compromises between them. The priestly class, the Magi
(listed by Herodotus as a distinct tribe within the Medes) survived from be-
fore the time of Zoroaster. As all priests do, they interpreted and adapted
doctrine and ritual to suit their own purposes, while remaining remarkably
faithful to the central oral tradition.
The history of the relationship between Iranians and Jews is almost as old
as the history of Iran itself. After the conquest of the northern Kingdom of
Israel by the Assyrians around 720 bc, large numbers of Jews were removed
to Media, among other places, setting up long-lived Jewish communities, no-
tably in Ecbatana/Hamadan. A second wave of deportations, this time to
Babylonian territory, took place in the 590s and 580s bc under Nebuchad-
nezzar, who destroyed the temple of Solomon in 586. Babylon came under
Persian control in the 530s, and thereafter many of the Jews eventually re-
turned home. Some scholars believe that Judaism changed significantly
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10 A History of Iran

under Mazdaean influence in the period of the Babylonian exile (the logical
corollary, the possibility of Judaic influence on Mazdaism, seems to have re-
ceived less attention). The trauma of the Babylonian exile was never forgot-
ten, and it marked a watershed in Jewish history in several ways. One of the
leaders of the return from Babylon, the scribe Ezra, is believed to have been
the first to write down the books of the Torah (the first five books of the
Bible, the books of Moses). He did so in a new script different from the one
used by the Jews before the exile. This is the Hebrew script used ever since.
Post-exile Judaism laid greater emphasis on adherence to the Torah, and on
monotheism.
For hundreds of years thereafter, first under the Persian Empire and later
under Hellenistic rulers, diaspora Jewish and Mazdaean religious communi-
ties lived adjacent to one another in cities all over the Middle East.9 It seems
plain that many religious ideas became common currency, and the Qumran
scrolls (the Dead Sea scrolls) indicate some crossover of religious concepts
from Mazdaism.10 It is a controversial subject, and the relative obscurity of
Mazdaism and Zoroastrianism in Western scholarship until recent times
has helped to conceal the influence of Mazdaism on Judaism; but as further
work is done, the more significant it is likely to be found. Perhaps the
strongest indicator is the positive attitude of the Jewish texts toward the
Persians.
There are a number of contradictions between the later practice of
Zoroastrianism, as it has come down to us in the written scriptures, and the
apparent norms of the Mazdaean religion at this earliest stage. Many of the
problems are difficult to resolve. It is a complex picture. But the concepts of
heaven and hell, of free human choice between good and evil, of divine judg-
ment, of angels, of a single creator-god—all appear to have been genuine
early features of the religion, and all were hugely influential for religions that
originated later. Mazdaism was the first religion—in this part of the world,
at least—to move beyond cult and totemism to address moral and philo-
sophical problems with its theology, emphasizing personal choice and re-
sponsibility. In that limited sense, Nietzsche was right—Zoroaster was the
first creator of the moral world we live in. Also sprach Zarathustra.
 Achaemenid Empire

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0465019205-text_Layout 1 12/28/09 5:48 PM Page 11

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Achaemenid Empire
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Elamite Empire Arabian Sea
11
0465019205-text_Layout 1 12/28/09 5:48 PM Page 13

Origins 13

mountain, has entrusted an unrivaled kinship to me . . . has made powerful my

weapons . . . he has brought the black-headed people in submission at my feet;
and mighty kings feared my warfare. . . .
In the course of my campaign, Beth-Dagon, Joppa, Banaibarka, Asuru,
cities of Sidka, who had not speedily bowed in submission at my feet, I be-
sieged, I conquered, I carried off their spoils. . . . I approached Ekron and slew
the governors and nobles who had rebelled, and hung their bodies on stakes
around the city. . . .
As for Hezekiah the Jew, who did not submit to my yoke: 46 of his strong,
walled cities . . . by means of ramps and by bringing up siege-engines . . . I be-
sieged and took them. 200,150 people, great and small, male and female,
horses, mules, asses, camels, cattle and sheep without number, I brought away
from them and counted as spoil. . . .11

The way the pharaohs of Egypt celebrated their rule and their victories
was very similar to this, and although Hezekiah, the king of Jerusalem, ap-
pears on the Taylor Prism as a victim, some parts of the Bible describing the
Israelites and their God smiting their enemies do not read very differently,
either.
By contrast, another clay object, about 9 inches by 4 inches, also discov-
ered in the nineteenth century and covered in cuneiform script, tells a rather
different story. The Cyrus cylinder, now in the British Museum, was found
where it had been deliberately placed—under the foundations of the city
wall of Babylon. It has been described as a charter of human rights for the
ancient world, which is an exaggeration and a misrepresentation. But the
message of the cylinder, particularly when combined with what is known of
Cyrus’s religious policy from the books of Ezra and Isaiah, is nonetheless re-
markable. The kingly preamble from the cylinder is fairly conventional:

I am Cyrus, king of the world, great king, rightful king, king of Babylon, king
of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters (of the earth), son of Camby-
ses, great king, king of Anshan, grandson of Cyrus, great king, king of An-
shan, descendant of Teispes, great king, king of Anshan, of a family that
always exercised kingship. . . .
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14 A History of Iran

But it continues, describing the favor shown to Cyrus by the Babylonian

god Marduk:

When I entered Babylon as a friend and when I established the seat of the
government in the palace of the ruler under jubilation and rejoicing, Marduk,
the great lord, induced the magnanimous inhabitants of Babylon to love me,
and I was daily endeavouring to worship him. My numerous troops walked
around in Babylon in peace, I did not allow anybody to terrorize any place of
the country of Sumer and Akkad. I strove for peace in Babylon and in all his
other sacred cities . . .

and concludes:

As to the region . . . as far as Assur and Susa, Agade, Eshnunna, the towns of
Zamban, Me-Turnu, Der as well as the region of the Gutians, I returned to
these sanctuaries on the other side of the Tigris, the sanctuaries of which had
been ruins for a long time, the images which used to live therein and estab-
lished for them permanent sanctuaries. I also gathered all their former inhabi-
tants and returned to them their habitations. Furthermore, I resettled upon
the command of Marduk, the great lord, all the gods of Sumer and Akkad
whom Nabonidus had brought into Babylon to the anger of the lord of the
gods, unharmed, in their former chapels, the places that make them happy.12

Like the proud declarations of Sennacherib, this is propaganda—but it is

propaganda of a different kind. It shows Cyrus in a different light, and ac-
cording to a different scale of values. Cyrus chose to present himself show-
ing respect to the Babylonian deity, Marduk. Perhaps it would have been
different if Cyrus had conquered Babylon by force, rather than marching
into it unopposed (in 539 bc) after its inhabitants revolted against the last
Babylonian king, Nabonidus. Cyrus was a ruthless, ambitious man; no one
ever conquered an empire without those characteristics in full measure. But
we know that he permitted freedom of worship to the Jews, too. Cyrus and
his successors permitted them to return home from exile and to rebuild the
0465019205-text_Layout 1 12/28/09 5:48 PM Page 15

Origins 15

temple in Jerusalem. For those acts they were accorded in the Jewish scrip-
tures a unique status among gentile monarchs.
The logic of statecraft alone might have suggested that it would be more
sustainable in the long run to let subjects conduct their own affairs and wor-
ship as they pleased. But that policy had to be acceptable to the Iranian elite,
including the priests—the Magi. Leaving aside the question of Cyrus’s per-
sonal beliefs, which remain unclear, it is reasonable to see in the policy some
of the spirit of moral earnestness and justice that pervaded the religion of
Zoroaster. The presence of those values in the background helps to explain
why the Cyrus cylinder is couched in such different terms from the mili-
taristic thunder and arrogance of Sennacherib. The old answer was terror
and a big stick, but the Persian Empire would be run in a more devolved,
permissive spirit. Once again, an encounter with complexity, acceptance of
that complexity, and a response. This was something new.
Unfortunately, according to Herodotus, Cyrus did not end his life as glo-
riously as he had lived it. Having conquered in the west, he turned to cam-
paign east of the Caspian. According to one account he was defeated and
killed in battle by Queen Tomyris of the Massagetae, another Iranian tribe
who fought mainly on horseback, like the Scythians.
The Massagetae are interesting because they appear to have maintained
some ancient Iranian customs that may shed light on the status of women in
Persian society under the Achaemenids. There are signs in Herodotus
(Book 1:216) that the Massagetae showed some features of a matrilineal,
polyandrous society, in which women might have a number of spouses or
sexual partners, but men only one. Patricia Crone has suggested that this
feature may resurface in men’s apparent holding of women in common as
practiced later by the Mazdakites in the fifth century ad, and by the Khor-
ramites after the Islamic conquest.13 Mazdaism certainly permitted a prac-
tice whereby an impotent man could give his wife temporarily to another in
order to obtain a child; it also sanctioned the marriage of close relatives. But
in general, Persian society seems to have leaned toward limiting the status of
women, following practices elsewhere in the Middle East. Royal and noble
women may have been able to own property in their own right—and even,
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16 A History of Iran

on occasion, to exert some political influence. But this seems to have been an
exception associated with high status rather than indicative of practices
prevalent in society more widely.14
Cyrus’s body was brought back to Persia, to Pasargadae, his capital, to
rest in a tomb there. That tomb, which can still be seen (though its contents
have long since disappeared), is massively simple rather than grandiose—a
sepulchre the size of a small house on a raised, stepped plinth. This tomb
burial has raised some questions about the religion of Cyrus and the other
Achaemenid kings. Many of his successors were placed in tombs of a differ-
ent type—rock tombs halfway up a cliff face. Tomb burial was anathema to
later Zoroastrians, who held it to be sacrilege to pollute the earth with dead
bodies. Instead they exposed the dead on so-called Towers of Silence, to be
consumed by birds and animals. Could the Achaemenid kings really have
been Zoroastrians if they permitted tomb burial?
Some have explained the inconsistency by suggesting that different
classes of Iranian society followed different beliefs—different religions, ef-
fectively. As we have seen, there probably was some considerable plurality of
belief within the broad flow of Mazdaism at this time. But it seems more
likely that the plurality was socially vertical rather than horizontal—a ques-
tion of geography and tribe rather than of social class. Perhaps an earlier,
pre-Zoroastrian tradition of burial still lingered and the elevated position of
all the royal tombs was a kind of compromise. Halfway between heaven and
earth—itself a strong metaphor. Around the tomb of Cyrus lay a paradise, a
garden watered by irrigation channels (our word paradise comes, via Greek,
from the Old Persian paradaida, meaning a walled garden). Magian priests
watched over the tomb and sacrificed a horse to Cyrus’s memory each
month.15
Cyrus had been a conqueror, but a conqueror with imagination and vi-
sion. He was at least as remarkable a man as that other conqueror, Alexan-
der, whose career marks the end of the Achaemenid period just as that of
Cyrus marks the beginning. Maybe as a youth Cyrus had a Mazdaean tutor
as remarkable as Aristotle, who taught Alexander.
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Origins 17

Religious Revolt
Cyrus was succeeded by his son Cambyses (Kambojiya), who extended the
empire by conquering Egypt, but in a short time gained a reputation for harsh-
ness. He died unexpectedly in 522 bc—by suicide, according to one source—
after he had been given news of a revolt in the empire’s Persian heartlands.
An account of what happened next appears on an extraordinary rock relief
carving at Bisitun, in western Iran, about twenty miles from Kermanshah,
above the main road to Hamadan. According to the text of the carving (exe-
cuted in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian), the revolt was led by a Magi,
Gaumata, who claimed falsely to be Cambyses’s younger brother, Bardiya.
Herodotus gives a similar version, saying that Cambyses had murdered the
true Bardiya years earlier. The revolt led by Gaumata seems to have drawn
force from social and fiscal grievances, because one of his measures to gain
popularity was to order a three-year remission of taxes. Another was to end
military conscription.16 Pressure had built up over decades of costly foreign
wars under Cyrus and Cambyses. But Gaumata also showed strong religious
intolerance, destroying the temples of sects he did not approve of.
An Iranian revolution, led by a charismatic cleric, seizing power from an
oppressive monarch, asserting religious orthodoxy, attacking false believers,
and drawing support from economic grievances—how modern that sounds.
But within a few months, Gaumata was dead, killed by Darius (Daryavaush)
and a small group of Persian confederates—a killing that sounds more like
an assassination than anything else.
The carving at Bisitun was made at Darius’s orders and it presents his ver-
sion of events, as put together after he had made himself king and the revolt
had finally been crushed. The carving itself says that copies of the same text
were made and distributed throughout the empire. And what a revolt it had
been—Babylon revolted twice, and Darius declared that he fought nineteen
battles in a single year. It was really a series of revolts, affecting all but a few of
the eastern provinces of the empire. The Bisitun carving illustrates this by
showing a row of defeated captives, each representing a different people or
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18 A History of Iran

territory. Whatever the true nature of the rebellion and its origins, it was no
simple palace coup, affecting only a few members of the elite. It was just the
first of several religious revolutions, or attempted revolutions, in Iran’s his-
tory. And it was no pushover.
Bisitun was chosen for Darius’s grand rock-carving because it was a high
place, perhaps already associated with the sacred, close by where he and his
companions had killed Gaumata/Bardiya. The site at Bisitun is a museum of
Iranian history in itself. Aside from the Darius rock relief, there are caves that
had been used by Neanderthals forty thousand years earlier, and by many gen-
erations after them. Among other relics and monuments, there is a rock-carving
of a reclining Hercules from the Seleucid period, a Parthian carving depicting
fire worship, a Sassanian bridge, some remains of a building from the Mongol
period, a seventeenth-century caravanserai, and, not far away, some fortifications
apparently dating from the time of Nader Shah in the eighteenth century.
Many historians have been suspicious about the story of the false
Bardiya. The Bisitun carving is a contemporary source, but it is plainly a self-
serving account to justify Darius’s accession. It is confirmed by Herodotus
and other Greek writers, but they all wrote later and would naturally have
accepted the official version of events if other dissenting accounts had been
stamped out. Darius was not a natural successor to the throne. He was de-
scended from a junior branch of the Achaemenid royal family, and even in
that line he was not preeminent—his father was still living. Could a Magian
priest have successfully impersonated a royal prince some three or four years
after the real man’s death? Is it not rather suspect that Darius also discred-
ited other opponents by alleging that they were imposters?
If the story was a fabrication, Darius was certainly brazen in the presenta-
tion of his case. In the Bisitun inscriptions, the rebel leaders are called liar
kings, and Darius, appealing to religious feeling and Mazdaean beliefs about
arta and druj, declares,

[. . .] you, whosoever shall be king hereafter, be on your guard very much

against Falsehood. The man who shall be a follower of Falsehood—punish
him severely . . .
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Origins 19

and,

[. . .] Ahura Mazda brought me aid and the other gods who are, because I was
not disloyal, I was no follower of Falsehood, I was no evil-doer, neither I nor
my family, I acted according to righteousness, neither to the powerless nor to
the powerful, did I do wrong . . .

and again,

This is what I have done, by the grace of Ahura Mazda have I always acted.
Whosoever shall read this inscription hereafter, let that which I have done be
believed. You must not hold it to be lies.

Perhaps Darius protested a little too much. Another inscription in Dar-

ius’s words, from another site, reads,

By the favor of Ahura Mazda I am of such a sort that I am a friend to right, I am

not a friend to wrong. It is not my desire that the weak man should have wrong
done to him by the mighty; nor is it my desire that the mighty man should have
wrong done to him by the weak. What is right, that is my desire. I am not a
friend to the man who is a lie-follower [. . .] As a horseman I am a good horse-
man. As a bowman I am a good bowman both afoot and on horseback . . .17

The latter part of this text, though telescoped here from the original,
echoes the famous formula from Herodotus and other Greek writers, that
Persian youths were brought up to ride a horse, shoot a bow, and tell the
truth. Darius was pressing every button to stimulate the approval of his sub-
jects. Even if one doubts the story of Darius’s accession, the evidence from
Bisitun and his other inscriptions of his self-justification, and the use of reli-
gion by both sides in the intensive fighting that followed the death of Cam-
byses, nonetheless stands. It is a powerful testimony to the force of the
Mazdaean religion at this time. Even the suppressors of the religious revolu-
tion had to justify their actions in religious terms. Although Darius by the
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20 A History of Iran

end reigned supreme, the inscriptions give a strong sense that he himself was
nonetheless subject to a powerful structure of ideas about justice, truth and
lies, and right and wrong. that was distinctively Iranian—and Mazdaean.

The Empire Refounded

Darius’s efforts to justify and dignify his rule did not end there. He built an
enormous palace in his Persian homeland, at what the Greeks later called
Persepolis (City of the Persians)—thus starting afresh, away from the previ-
ous capital of Cyrus at Pasargadae. Persepolis is so big that a modern visitor,
wandering bemused between the sections of fallen columns and the massive
double-headed column capitals that crashed to the ground when the palace
burned, finds it difficult to become oriented, much less make sense of it. The
magnificence of the palace served as a further prop to the majesty of Darius
and the legitimacy of his rule. But it helped in turn to create a lasting tradi-
tion, a mystique of magnificent kingship that might not have come about
but for the initial doubts over his accession. A dedicatory inscription at
Persepolis played again on the old theme:

May Ahura Mazda protect this land from hostile armies, from famine, and
from the Lie.

The motif of tribute and submission is also repeated from Bisitun. Row
upon row of figures representing subjects from all over the empire are shown
queuing up to present themselves, frozen forever in stone relief. The purpose
of the huge palace complex at Persepolis is not entirely clear. It may be that
it was intended as a place for celebrations and ceremonies at the time of the
spring equinox, the Persian New Year (Noruz—celebrated on and after
March 21 each year, today as then). The rows of tribute-bearers depicted in
the sculpture suggest that it may have been the place for annual demonstra-
tions of homage and loyalty from the provinces. Whatever the reason for the
grandeur of Persepolis, it was never the main, permanent capital of the em-
pire. That was at Susa, the old capital of Elam.
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Origins 21

This, again, shows the syncretism of the Persian regime. Cyrus had been
closely connected with the royal family of the Medes, and the Medes had a
privileged position with the Persians as partners at the head of the empire.
But Elam, too, was important and central, and not least for its language, as
used in administration and monumental inscriptions. This was an empire
that always preferred to flow around and absorb powerful rivals, rather than
to confront, batter into defeat, and force submission. The guiding principles
of Cyrus persisted under Darius and at least some later Achaemenid rulers.
Darius’s reign saw the Achaemenid Empire in effect re-founded. It could
have gone under altogether in the rebellions that followed the death of Cam-
byses. But Darius maintained Cyrus’s tradition of tolerance, permitting a
plurality of gods to be worshipped as before. He also maintained the related
principle of devolved government. The provinces were ruled by satraps, gov-
ernors who returned a tribute to the center but ruled as viceroys (two other
officials looked after military matters and fiscal administration in each
province, to avoid too much power being concentrated in any one pair of
hands). The satraps, who often inherited their offices from predecessors
within the same family, ruled their provinces according to pre-existing laws,
customs, and traditions. They were, in effect, provincial kings, while Darius
was king of kings (Shahanshah in modern Persian). The empire did not at-
tempt, as a matter of policy, to Persianize as the Roman Empire, for exam-
ple, later sought to Romanize.
The certainties of religion, the principle of sublime justice that they un-
derpinned, and the magnificent prestige of kingship—these were the bonds
that held together this otherwise diffuse constellation of peoples, languages,
and cultures. A complex empire was accepted as such, and was subjected to a
controlling principle. The system established by Darius worked, proved re-
silient, and endured.
Tablets discovered in excavations at Persepolis show the complexity and
administrative sophistication of the system Darius established. Although
Darius established a standard gold coinage, and some payments were made
in silver, much of the system operated by payments in kind. These were as-
sessed, allocated, and receipted from the center. State officials and servants
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22 A History of Iran

were paid in fixed quantities of wine, grain, or animals; but even members
of the royal family received payments in the same way. Officials in Persepo-
lis gave orders for the levying of taxes in kind in other locations, and then
gave orders for payments in kind to be made from the proceeds in the same
locations. Couriers were given tablets to produce at post stations along the
royal highways, so they could get food and lodging for themselves and their
animals. These tablets recording payments in kind cover only a relatively
limited period, from 509 to 494 bc. There are several thousand of them, and
it has been estimated that they cover supplies to more than fifteen thousand
different people in more than one hundred different places.18
It is significant that the tablets were written mainly in Elamite, not in
Persian. We know from other sources that the main language of administra-
tion in the empire was neither Persian nor Elamite, but Aramaic, the Se-
mitic lingua franca of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine. The Bisitun
inscription states directly that the form of written Persian used there was
new, developed at Darius’s own orders for that specific purpose. It is possible
that he and the other Achaemenid kings discouraged any record of events
other than their own monumental inscriptions, but these are all strong
echoes of the Iranian distaste for writing that we encountered earlier in
Mazdaism, and it may go some way to explain an apparent anomaly—the
lack of Persian historical writing for the Achaemenid period. It is possible
that histories were recorded, that poems were written down, and that all
sorts of other literature once existed and have since been simply lost. But
later Persian literary culture was strongly associated with a class of scribes,
and the fact that the scribes in the Achaemenid system wrote their accounts
and official records in other languages suggests that the literature was not
there, either. There was no Persian history of the Achaemenid Empire be-
cause the Persian ruling classes either (the Magi) regarded writing as wicked
or (the kings and nobles) associated writing with inferior peoples—or both.
To ride, to shoot the bow, to tell the truth—but not to write it.
That said, no histories as such have survived from the Egyptian, Hittite,
or Assyrian empires, either. It is more correct, in the context of the fifth cen-
tury bc, to call the innovation of history writing by the Greeks an anomaly.
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Origins 23

To ourselves, at our great remove of time, awash with written materials

and dominated by the getting and spending of money, a human system that
was largely nonliterate and operating for the most part on the basis of pay-
ments in kind, not cash, seems primitive. But the history of human develop-
ment is not linear. We should not regard the oral tradition of sophisticated
cultures like that of Mazdaism as unreliable, flawed, or backward, something
we have gone beyond. The Persians were not stupidly trying, with the wrong
tools, to do something we can now, with the right tools, do incomparably
better. They were doing something different, and they had evolved complex
and subtle ways of doing it very well indeed, which our culture has forgot-
ten. To try to grasp the reality of that, we have to step aside a little from our
usual categories of thought—despite the apparent familiarity of concepts
like angels, a Day of Judgment, heaven and hell, and moral choice. The
Achaemenid Empire was an empire of the mind, but a different kind of
mind.

The Empire and the Greeks

In general, Darius’s reign was one of restoration and consolidation. It was
not a reign of conquest like those that had been pursued by Cyrus and
Cambyses. But Darius did campaign into Europe in 512 bc, conquering
Thrace and Macedonia, and toward the end of his life, after a revolt by the
Ionian Greeks of the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, his subordinates fought a
war with the Athenian Greeks that ended with a Persian defeat at the Battle
of Marathon in 490 bc. This ushered in what the Greeks called the Persian
wars, the shadow of which has affected our view of the Achaemenid Empire,
and perhaps our views of Persia, Iran, and the Orient in general. From a Per-
sian perspective, the more serious event was a revolt in Egypt in 486 bc. Be-
fore he could deal with this, Darius died.
The standard Greek view of the Persians and their empire was complex,
and not a little contradictory. The Greeks regarded the Persians, as they re-
garded most non-Greeks, as barbarians (the term barbarian is thought to
come from a disparaging imitation of Persian speech—“ba-ba”), and therefore
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24 A History of Iran

ignorant and backward. The Greeks were aware that the Persians had a
great, powerful, wealthy empire—but one, to their minds, run on tyrannical
principles and redolent of vulgar ostentation and decadence. The Persians
were therefore both backward and decadent. Here, we may be irresistibly re-
minded of the contemporary French view of the United States. Perhaps the
view of the Greeks also was better explained in terms of a simple resentment
or jealousy that the Persians, rather than the Greeks, were running such a
large part of the known world.
This is a caricature of the Greek opinion of the Persians, and cannot have
been, for example, Plato’s attitude or the attitude (openly, at any rate) of the
many Greeks who worked for or were allies of the Persians at various
times.19 The Greeks were also an imperialistic or at least a colonizing culture
of pioneering Indo-European origin. Perhaps the hostility between the Per-
sians and the Greeks had as much to do with similarity as with difference.
But in contrast to the Persians, the Greeks were not a single, unified power.
They were composed of a multiplicity of rival city-states, and their influence
was maritime rather than land-based. Greeks had established colonies along
almost all parts of the Mediterranean coast not previously colonized by the
Phoenicians, including places that later became Tarragona in Spain, Mar-
seilles in France, Cyrenaica in Libya, and large parts of Sicily and southern
Italy. They had done the same on the coast of the Black Sea. Unlike the Per-
sians, their spread was based on physical settlement, rather than on the con-
trol of indigenous peoples from afar.
Just as Persians appear in Greek plays and on Greek vases, there are also
examples showing the presence of the Greeks in the minds of the Persians.
As well as vases that show a Greek spearing a falling or recumbent Persian,
there are engraved cylinder seals showing a Persian stabbing a Greek or fill-
ing him with arrows.20 But it is fair to say the Persians were more present to
the Greeks—at least initially—than the Greeks to the Persians. Persian
power controlled important Greek cities like Miletus and Phocaea in Asia
Minor—only a few hours’ rowing away from Athens and Corinth—as well
as Chalcidice and Macedonia on the European side of the Bosphorus. In
Persepolis, Susa, and Hamadan, by contrast, Greece would have seemed half
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Origins 25

a world away, and events in other parts of the empire—Egypt, Babylonia,

and Bactria—were equally or rather more pressing.
Darius was succeeded by his son, Xerxes (Khashayarsha). The set-piece
of Xerxes’s reign in the historical record was the great expedition to punish
Athens and its allies for their support of the Ionian revolt. But at least as im-
portant for Xerxes himself would have been his successful reassertion of au-
thority in Egypt and Babylon, where he crushed a rebellion and destroyed
the temple of Marduk that Cyrus had restored. Xerxes is believed (on the
authority of Herodotus) to have taken as many as two million men with
him to attack Athens in 480 bc. His troops wiped out the rearguard of
Spartans and others at Thermopylae, killing the Spartan king Leonidas in a
protracted struggle that left many of the Persian troops dead. Xerxes’s men
then took Athens, his hardy soldiers scaling the Acropolis and burning it.
But his fleet was defeated at Salamis, leaving his armies overextended and
vulnerable. Xerxes then withdrew to Sardis, his base in Asia Minor, and his
forces suffered further defeats the following year at Plataea and Mycale (479
bc). Among other effects of the Persian defeat was the loss of influence on
Macedon and Thrace on the European side of the Bosphorus, permitting
the subsequent rise of Macedon.
Xerxes’s son Artaxerxes (Artakhshathra) succeeded him in 465 bc and
reigned for some forty years. The building work at Persepolis continued
through the reigns of both, and it was under these two kings that many of
the Jews of Babylonia returned to Jerusalem, under the leadership of Ezra
and Nehemiah. Nehemiah was Artaxerxes’s court cupbearer in Susa, and
both Ezra and Nehemiah eventually returned to the Persian court after
their efforts to rebuild Jerusalem. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah give a
different picture of the Persian monarchy to contrast with the less flattering
image in the Greek accounts.
The wars that continued between the Persians and the Greeks ended at
least for a time with the peace of Callias in 449 bc, but thereafter the Per-
sians supported Sparta against Athens in the terribly destructive Pelopon-
nesian wars. These conflicts exhausted the older Greek city-states and
prepared the way for the hegemony of Macedon. At the death of Artaxerxes,
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26 A History of Iran

palace intrigues resulted in the murders of several kings or pretenders in

succession. In the reign of Artaxerxes II (404–359 bc) there were further
wars with the Greeks, and a sustained Egyptian revolt that kept that satrapy
independent until Persian rule was restored under Artaxerxes III in 343 bc.
But then a particularly lethal round of political intrigue orchestrated by the
vizier or chief minister Bagoas caused the deaths of both Artaxerxes III and
his son Arses, bringing Darius III to the throne in 336 bc.
The Iranians must have changed their way of life considerably over the
two centuries between the reigns of Cyrus and Darius III. One indicator of
social change was the constitution of their armies. Prior to and during
Xerxes’s invasion of Greece, large numbers of Medes and Persians fought on
foot, but by the time of Darius III the armies were dominated by large num-
bers of horsemen. The impression is that the wealth of the empire had en-
abled the Iranian military classes to distribute themselves across the empire
and supply themselves with horses, changing the nature of Persian warfare.
There seems also to have been a deliberate policy of military garrisoning and
military colonies, notably in Asia Minor. According to Herodotus, Cyrus
had warned that if the Persians descended to live in the rich lands of the
plain (he probably had Babylonia particularly in mind), they would become
soft and incapable of defending their empire. It is too neat to suggest that
this is precisely what happened. It may be somewhat the contrary—that by
the time of Darius III, taxes had risen too high and the Iranians, having had
their expectations raised, had become impoverished and demoralized. But
whatever their exact nature, fundamental changes had taken place, and Iran
had already moved closer to the social and military patterns of the later
Parthian and Sassanid empires.

Macedonia—Strange Fruit
Who were the Macedonians? Some have speculated that they were not
really Greeks, but more closely related to the Thracians. Or perhaps they de-
scended from some other Balkan people influenced by the arrival of Indo-
European Greeks. They had come under heavy Greek influence by the time
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Origins 27

of Philip and Alexander—but even at that late stage the Macedonians made
a strong distinction between themselves and the Greek hangers-on who ac-
companied Alexander’s eastern adventure. In the fifth century bc, Macedo-
nians were normally, like other non-Greeks, excluded from the Olympic
games. But the Persians seem to have referred to them as “Greeks with hats”
(they were known for their wide-brimmed hats), and Herodotus too seems
to have accepted them as of Greek origin. Like the Medes and Persians in
the time of Cyrus, as well as many other militant peoples from mountainous
or marginal areas, the Macedonians had a strong sense of their collective su-
periority—but they also sustained many private feuds among themselves.
They were notoriously difficult to manage.
Few stories from the classical world are better known than that of Philip
of Macedon and his son Alexander. Often the importance of the father to
the success of the son is neglected in favor of the latter’s more dramatic vic-
tories. Philip was born around 380 bc, became king of Macedon in 359 bc,
and immediately set about the expansion of his kingdom. One essential con-
tribution to the success of Macedon was his creation of a new, tightly drilled
infantry corps, equipped with a longer spear or pike than was normal in
Greece at the time. In favorable conditions this army usually swept aside or
rolled over conventionally armed infantry. Having established himself as the
prime power in northern Greece and Thrace, Philip defeated the alliance of
Athens and Thebes at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 bc, and then set up
the League of Corinth, which established Macedonian hegemony and effec-
tively ended the independence of the Greek city-states, with the exception of
Sparta. When Philip demanded submission of the Spartans, saying that he
would come to Sparta and wreck their farms, kill the people, and destroy
their city, the Spartans replied: “If.” Philip and his son left the Spartans
alone—perhaps not least for the sake of the legend of Thermopylae.
Philip had other plans in any case—plans to invade the Persian Empire.
His preparations were quite open, and were justified in pan-Hellenic terms by
reference to the Persian desecration of Athenian temples in the invasion of
480 bc. But in 336 bc, before Philip could put his invasion plans into effect, he
was murdered. The circumstances of the murder are murky and were disputed
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28 A History of Iran

at the time—some have suggested that Alexander and his mother Olympias
were involved, but it is possible that the Persians instigated the killing.
Alexander continued where his father had left off. He consolidated his
authority in Greece, quickly crushing a rebellion in Thebes, and then, in 334
bc, crossed into Asia Minor. He defeated a Persian army at the Granicus
River (near the Dardanelles), conquered the towns of the Ionian coast—in-
cluding the Persian regional base at Sardis—and then marched east. The
following year he defeated Darius at the Battle of Issus (on the Mediterra-
nean coast near the modern border between Syria and Turkey), leading the
decisive attack personally at the head of his companion cavalry (hetairoi).
Alexander then marched south, taking the coastal cities, conquering Egypt
and founding Alexandria. Moving east again, in 331 bc Alexander defeated
Darius in a third battle, at Gaugamela, near Mosul and Irbil in what is now
Iraqi Kurdistan. Darius left the battlefield and was killed some time after by
Bessus, the satrap of Bactria.
This is not the place to consider Alexander’s conduct of war in any detail,
but his military brilliance illustrates something that may appear at first
counter-intuitive—the feminine nature of military genius at the highest
level. Successful high command has little or nothing to do with masculine
attributes like brute force, bravado, machismo, arrogance, or even courage,
except insofar as it may be necessary to advertise these from time to time to
inspire the troops. Rather, it has to do with what one might regard as more
feminine characteristics—sensitivity, subtlety, intuition, timing, an indirect
approach, an ability quietly to assess strength and weakness (based perhaps
on an intuitive grasp for the opponent’s likely behavior as much as factual in-
formation) to avoid and baffle strength, to flow around it, to absorb its force
and strike unexpectedly at the weak spot at precisely the right moment. Mil-
itary history shows again and again that predictable male behavior, manifest
in frontal attacks and reliance on strength alone, is at best a liability and at
worst catastrophically wasteful at the command level. The maximum effec-
tiveness of military force is achieved only by the more subtle methods asso-
ciated with what one might call a feminine approach. Without making any
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Origins 29

crass connection to Alexander’s bisexuality, his conduct of warfare exempli-

fies this well.
Alexander continued on to Babylon, Susa, and finally Persepolis, which he
burned to destruction in 330 bc after some weeks and months of celebra-
tions. One story says that a courtesan accompanying the army, Thaïs, per-
suaded Alexander to destroy the palaces while he was drunk, in revenge for
the burning of the Athenian Acropolis by Xerxes, and threw in the first torch
herself. But it is likely that the destruction was a deliberate political act, to
show that the Achaemenid dynasty was over for good. Notwithstanding the
destruction of Persepolis, Alexander had been presenting himself, at least
since Gaugamela, not so much as the revenger of Greece but as the successor
to the Achaemenians.21 From now on he appears to have followed a deliberate
Persianizing policy, encouraging his troops to marry local women and settling
them in colonies. He himself married several Persian princesses, including
Statira, the daughter of Darius III, and later Roxana (whose name is cognate
with the modern Persian word roshan, meaning “light”), daughter of Oxyartes
of Bactria. Alexander continued with his campaigns, into the farthest reaches
of the former empire, wiping out all resistance, and then beyond, into India
and what is now the Punjab. But his troops grew increasingly weary of the
never-ending wars, and disaffected with his perceived pro-Persian policy.
Alexander died in Babylon in 323 bc, probably of natural causes, after a
session of heavy drinking. The succession to his empire was left unclear, and
the result was a lengthy series of wars between his generals to divide up his
conquests. In these, the murderous unruliness of the Macedonians emerged
with full force. Alexander’s secretary Eumenes of Cardia had some tempo-
rary success in reunifying the centrifugal elements in support of Alexander’s
young son, born to Roxana after his death. But the other generals and sol-
diers disliked Eumenes because he was a Greek and a scholar, and in 316 bc
he was betrayed and killed. Within a few years Roxana and Alexander’s son
were also murdered.
Despite his early death, Alexander’s aim—to bring Greek influence into
Persia, Persian influence into Greece, and to create a blend of Eastern and
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30 A History of Iran

Western civilizations—was realized to a startling extent. But ultimately it

failed. For more than a century after Alexander’s death, Persia was ruled by
the descendants of Seleucus, one of Alexander’s generals, and Greek influ-
ence persisted after that. But the kings of the Seleucid period ruled more in
a grand Persian rather than a Greek style. This was arguably also the case for
the Ptolemies who ruled in Egypt. When Rome rose to dominate the entire
Mediterranean basin, the Roman Empire was divided between the Greek
east and the Latin west—but still the style of the Greek east showed the in-
fluence of the vanished Achaemenid Empire, and in turn influenced Ro-
mans with imperial ambitions from Pompey to Elagabalus.
Although the Iranians submitted to foreign rule—not for the last time in
their history—Greek influence was ultimately passing and superficial de-
spite the presence of colonies of Greek ex-soldiers. The Mazdaean religion
persisted and consolidated, serving as a focus for hostility to the Greeks, and
to the memory of Alexander.
It is generally recognized that the historical accounts we have of Alexan-
der and his life are partial, written mainly by authors writing at second hand
and in awe of their subject. They are all Western accounts, and although
there is an Eastern tradition of Alexander (Iskander) as a warrior-hero, the
Zoroastrian tradition about him is very negative, suggesting a different side
to the story. There is little in the Western sources about measures Alexander
took to establish or consolidate his rule, but the Zoroastrian record says he
killed many Magi and teachers, and that the sacred flames in many fire tem-
ples were extinguished. This may simply reflect the incidental killing and de-
struction of the plundering Macedonian armies. But it is likely that the
Magian priests, proprietors as they were of the religion that underpinned
the Achaemenian state and therefore the most likely center for any contin-
ued resistance or revolt, would have been a target for repression in any case.
Whatever exactly happened, it is unlikely that the Iranians cooperated as
submissively in Alexander’s pacification policies as the Western historians
later suggested. In later Zoroastrian writings Alexander is the only human
to share with Ahriman the title guzastag—meaning “accursed.”22
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2
The Iranian Revival
Parthians and Sassanids

We have made enquiries about the rules of the inhabitants of the

Roman empire and the Indian states. . . . We have never rejected
anybody because of their different religion or origin. We have not
jealously kept away from them what we affirm. And at the same
time we have not disdained to learn what they stand for. For it is a
fact that to have knowledge of the truth and of sciences and to
study them is the highest thing with which a king can adorn
himself. And the most disgraceful thing for kings is to disdain
learning and be ashamed of exploring the sciences. He who does
not learn is not wise.
—Khosraw I Anushirvan
(according to the Byzantine historian Agathias)

The empire established by Seleucus Nicator in 312 bc looked to be the most

powerful of the successor states that emerged out of the collection of territo-
ries conquered by Alexander. It controlled Syria, Mesopotamia, and the
lands of the Iranian plateau—as well as (at least in theory) other territories
further east. Initially the capital was established at Babylon, and later at a

31
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32 A History of Iran

new site at Seleuceia on the Tigris River. Finally it moved to Antioch on the
Mediterranean Sea.
The Seleucid kings pursued the easternizing policy of Alexander. They es-
tablished Greek military and trading colonies in the east and used Iranian
manpower in their armies, but their political attention was on the west—
particularly on their rivalry with the other major eastern Macedonian/Greek
dynasty, that of the Ptolemies in Egypt. In the east, outlying satrapies like
Sogdiana and Bactria gradually became independent princedoms, the latter
creating an enduring culture in what is now northern Afghanistan, fusing
eastern and Greek cultures under Greek successor dynasties.

Warrior Horsemen
The horse-based cultures of the northeast had given Alexander problems,
and the Achaemenids before him. Tribes like the Dahae and the Sakae, who
spoke languages in the Iranian family group, would always be very difficult
for any empire to dominate. With their military strength entirely on horse-
back, they were highly mobile and able, when threatened, to disappear into
the great expanses of desert and semi-desert south of the Aral Sea. Within
two generations of Seleucus Nicator’s death in 281 bc, one tribe or group of
tribes among the Dahae—the Parni—established their supremacy in
Parthia and other lands east of the Caspian. They supplanted the local Se-
leucid satrap, Andragoras—who around 250 bc had rebelled and tried to
make himself an independent ruler in Parthia—and began to threaten the
remaining territories of the Seleucids in the east. The Parni ruling family
named themselves Arsacids after Arshak (Arsaces), the man who had led
them to take control of Parthia. But as the Arsacids expanded their domin-
ion, they were careful to preserve the wealth and culture of the Greek
colonies in the towns. Parthian kings later used the title philhellenos (friend of
the Greeks) on their coinage.
Several Seleucid kings carried out expeditions to the east to restore their
authority in Parthia and Bactria, and the Parthian Arsacids occasionally
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The Iranian Revival 33

chose to ally with them or even to submit, rather than to confront them. But
the Seleucids were always drawn back to the west, and in the reign of the
Arsacid Mithradates I (171–138 bc) the Parthians renewed their expansion,
taking Sistan, Elam, and Media. Then they captured Babylon in 142 bc and,
one year later, Seleuceia itself.
In the decades that followed, the Parthians were attacked by the Sakae in
the east and by the Seleucids in the west. Fortunes swung either way. At one
point in 128 bc the Parthians defeated a Seleucid army, captured it, and at-
tempted to use the prisoners against the Sakae—only to find that the Seleu-
cid troops had made common cause with the Sakae. Together, they defeated
and killed the Parthian king, Phraates. But Mithradates II (Mithradates the
Great) was able to consolidate and stabilize Parthian rule in a long reign from
about 123 to 87 bc, subduing enemies in both east and west. He also took the
title King of Kings, a deliberate reference back to the Achaemenid monarchy.
This, along with other indicators, suggests a new Iranian self-confidence.
Concealed behind the long struggle between the Seleucids and the
Parthians lie the origins of the silk trade, which was to be of central impor-
tance for many Iranian towns and cities for more than a millennium. The
initial involvement of Greeks and Greek cities in the silk business may go
some way toward explaining both the survival of Greek culture in the
Parthian period, and the Parthian kings’ respect for it. They were friends to
the Greeks not out of aesthetic sensibility or deference to a superior culture,
but because they wanted to protect the goose that laid the golden egg.1
Mithradates had diplomatic contacts with both the Chinese Han emperor
Wu Ti and with the Roman republic under the dictator Sulla. In order to es-
tablish a lasting presence in Mesopotamia, either he or his successor Go-
tarzes founded a new city at Ctesiphon, near Seleuceia. Ctesiphon was to
continue as the capital for more than seven hundred years, though Seleuceia,
on the other side of the Tigris, was often used as the center of administra-
tion, and Ecbatana/Hamadan as the summer capital.
The Parthians established a powerful empire and ruled successfully for
several centuries, but they did so with a relatively light touch, assimilating
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34 A History of Iran

the practices of previous rulers and being content to tolerate the variety of
religious, linguistic, and cultural patterns of their subject provinces. A sys-
tem of devolved power (parakandeh shahi, also called muluk al-tawa’if in later
Arab sources) through satraps continued, often keeping in power families
that had ruled under the Seleucids.2 Parthian scribes continued to use Ara-
maic, as in the time of the Achaemenids, and there appears to have been a
continued diversity of religion. Names like Mithradates and Phraates (the
latter a name thought to be related to the fravashi of the Avesta) show the
Mazdaean allegiances of the Arsacids themselves, but Babylonians, Greeks,
Jews, and others were allowed to follow their own religious traditions. As be-
fore, Mazdaism itself seems to have encompassed a variety of practices and
beliefs. In Jewish tradition, the Parthians are recorded and remembered
(with the important exception of the reign of one later king) as tolerant and
friendly toward the Jews.3 This may reflect the fact that the rise of the
Parthians in the east was helped by the prolonged struggle between the
Maccabean Jews and the Seleucids in Palestine.
The Parthians were not just crude nomads assuming the culture of their
subjects for lack of any of their own—or, at least, they did not remain so.
Parthian sculpture, with its own particular style that included a strong em-
phasis on frontality, was different in kind from any predecessor. Parthian
architecture—as excavated at Nisa, for example (in what is now Turk-
menistan)—shows for the first time the emergence of the audience hall or
ivan, a feature to be of great importance later, in Sassanid and Islamic archi-
tecture. The Parthians exemplified the best of Iranian genius—the recogni-
tion, acceptance, and tolerance of the complexity of the cultures and
influences over which they ruled, while retaining a strong central principle of
identity and integrity.

Rome’s Great Rival in the East

The Parthians were also masters of the art of war, as they would show in the
next period of conflict, with Rome. Driven on to ever-wider conquests by
the ambitions of mighty patricians like Pompeii, Lucullus, and Crassus,
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0465019205-text_Layout 1 12/28/09 5:49 PM Page 35

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36 A History of Iran

leaders who saw conquest and military glory as necessary adjuncts to a suc-
cessful political career, the Roman republic by the first half of the first cen-
tury bc had taken over the eastern Mediterranean from its previous
Hellenistic overlords and had begun to press even farther eastward. The Ro-
mans’ main area of conflict with the Parthians was in Armenia, Syria, and
northern Mesopotamia.
In 53 bc Marcus Licinius Crassus, a fabulously rich Roman politician
who had destroyed the slave revolt of Spartacus in southern Italy in earlier
years, became the new governor of Roman Syria. Hoping to make conquests
in the east to rival those recently achieved by Caesar in Gaul, Crassus
marched an army of some forty thousand men east to Carrhae (modern
Harran)—arrogantly rejecting the advice of the king of Armenia to take ad-
vantage of his friendship and follow a less exposed northerly route. At Car-
rhae Crassus’s army was met in the open plain by a smaller but fast-moving
force of about ten thousand Parthian horsemen, including large numbers of
horse archers, supported by a much smaller force of heavily armored cavalry-
men on armored horses, each man wielding a long, heavy lance. The Roman
force was composed primarily of armored infantry equipped with swords
and heavy throwing spears, along with some Gaulish cavalrymen who were
either lightly armored or not armored at all.
The Parthians confronted Crassus with a kind of fighting that the Ro-
mans had not previously encountered, and against which they had no an-
swer. The Roman infantry advanced, but the Parthian horse archers
withdrew before them, circling around to shoot arrows into the flanks of
their column. Hour after hour the arrows rained down on the Romans, and
despite their heavy armor the powerful Parthian war bows frequently
zinged an arrow past the edge of a shield, found a gap at the neck between
body armor and helmet, punched through a weak link in chain mail, or
wounded a soldier’s unprotected hands or feet. The Romans grew tired and
thirsty in the heat, and their frustration at not being able to get to grips
with the Parthians turned to defeatism, especially when they saw the
Parthians resupply themselves with arrows from masses of heavily laden
pack camels.
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The Iranian Revival 37

At one point Crassus’s son led a detachment, including the Gaulish cav-
alry, against the Parthians. The Parthians pulled back as if in disorder, but
their real intention was to draw the detachment away beyond any possible
assistance from the main body. When the Gauls rode ahead to chase off the
archers, the Parthian heavy cavalry charged down on them, spearing the
lightly armored Gauls and their horses with their long lances. In despera-
tion, the Gauls tried to attack the Parthian horses by dismounting and
rolling under them, trying to stab up at their unprotected bellies, but even
this desperate tactic could not save them. Then the full strength of the
Parthian horse archers turned on the Roman detachment. More and more
of them were hit by arrows, while all were disoriented and confused by the
clouds of dust thrown up by the Parthians’ horses. Crassus’s son pulled his
men back to a small hill—where they were surrounded and eventually
killed, with the exception of about five hundred, who were taken prisoner.
The defeat of the detachment and the jubilation of the Parthians further
demoralized the main Roman force. Finally, Crassus attempted to negotiate
with the Parthian general, Suren, only to be killed in a scuffle and beheaded.
The survivors of the Roman army withdrew in disorder back into Roman
Syria. Meanwhile, as many as ten thousand Roman prisoners were marched
off by the Parthians to the remote northeast of the empire.
According to the Greek historian Plutarch the head of Crassus was sent
to the Parthian king, Orodes, and it arrived while the king was listening to
an actor delivering some lines from Euripedes’s play The Bacchae. To the ap-
plause of the court, the actor took the head and spoke the words of Queen
Agave of Thebes, who in the play unwittingly killed her own son, King
Pentheus, while in a Bacchic trance:

We’ve hunted down a lion’s whelp today,

And from the mountains bring a noble prey4

Some have suggested that the Parthian general, recorded in the Western
sources as Suren, was the warrior-hero later remembered as Rostam and im-
mortalized in the revered tenth-century Persian poet Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh
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38 A History of Iran

(Book of Kings). Like Rostam, Suren hailed from Sistan (originally Sakas-
tan—the land of the Sakae), and like Rostam, he also had a troubled rela-
tionship with his king. Orodes was so resentful of Suren’s victory that he
had him murdered.
The defeat at Carrhae was a great blow to Roman prestige in the east, and
after it the Parthians were able to extend their control to include Armenia.
But in the fiercely competitive environment of Rome toward the end of the
republic, the defeat, humiliation, and death of Crassus were a challenge as
much as a warning. To succeed where Crassus had failed—to win a Parthian
triumph—became an inviting political prize. Another incentive was the
wealth of the silk trade. While the hostile Parthians controlled the central
part of the route to China, wealthy Romans were dismayed to see much of
the gold they paid to have their wives and daughters clothed in expensive
silks going to their most redoubtable enemies.
The next Roman to test the Parthians in a major way was Mark Antony.
But between the expeditions of Crassus and Antony, the Parthians and the
Romans fought several other campaigns, with mixed outcomes. In 51 bc
some Roman survivors from Carrhae ambushed an invading Parthian force
near Antioch and destroyed it. But in 40 bc another Parthian force, com-
manded by Orodes’s son Pacorus (with the help of a renegade Roman,
Quintus Labienus), broke out of Syria and conquered both Palestine and
most of the provinces of Asia Minor. Exploiting the chaos of the civil wars
that followed the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 bc, the Parthian invaders re-
ceived the submission of many towns without a siege. But a year or so later
Publius Ventidius, one of Mark Antony’s subordinates, rescued the eastern
provinces with some of the veteran legions of Caesar’s army. He defeated the
Parthians in a series of battles in which all the main Parthian commanders
were killed, including Pacorus and Labienus. Back in Rome, Ventidius’s tri-
umph over the Parthians was considered a rare honor. Seeing his lieutenant
so praised, Mark Antony wanted the glory of a victory against the Parthians
for himself.
In 36 bc he took an army more than double the size of that of Crassus
into the same area of upper Mesopotamia.5 Antony soon encountered many
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The Iranian Revival 39

of the same difficulties that had frustrated Crassus. The Romans found that
their best remedy against the Parthian arrows was to form the close forma-
tion called the testudo (tortoise), in which the soldiers closed up so that their
shields made a wall in front, with the ranks behind holding their shields over
their heads, overlapping, to make a roof. This made an effective defense but
slowed the army’s advance to a crawl. The Roman infantry still could not hit
back at the Parthian horse archers, whose mobility enabled them to range at
will around the marching Romans and attack them at their most vulnerable.
The Parthians were also able to attack Antony’s supply columns, and the dif-
ficulty of finding food and water made the large numbers of the invading
force a liability rather than an asset. Having suffered in this way in the
south, Antony attempted a more northerly attack on Parthian territory, pen-
etrating into what is now Azerbaijan. But he achieved little, and was forced
to retreat through Armenia in the winter cold, losing as many as twenty-
four thousand men.
Antony saved some face by a later campaign in Armenia, but the overall
message of these Roman encounters with the Parthians was that the styles
of warfare of the opponents, and the geography of the region, dictated a
stalemate that would be difficult for either side to break. The Parthian cav-
alry was vulnerable to ambush by Roman infantry in the hilly, less open ter-
rain of the Roman-controlled territories, and lacked the siege equipment
necessary to take the Roman towns. At the same time, the Romans were vul-
nerable to the Parthians in the open Mesopotamian plain and would always
find it difficult to protect their supply lines against the more mobile Parthian
forces. These factors were more or less permanent.
Perhaps recognizing the intractability of this situation, after Augustus
eventually achieved supremacy in the Roman Empire and ended the civil
wars by defeating Mark Antony in 31/30 bc, Augustus followed a policy of
diplomacy with the Parthians. In this way he was able to retrieve the eagle
standards of the legions that had been lost at Carrhae. The Parthians seem
to have used the period of peace in the west to create a new Indo-Parthian
empire in the Punjab, under a line descended from the Suren family. But the
wars in the west began again in the reign of Nero, after the Parthian king
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40 A History of Iran

Vologases I (Valkash) had appointed a new king in Armenia, which the Ro-
mans regarded as a dependent state of the Roman Empire. The general
Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo conquered Armenia in ad 58–60, but the
Parthians counterattacked with some success thereafter, capturing a Roman
force.6 It has been suggested that the Roman armor made of overlapping
plates (lorica segmentata), familiar from films and children’s books, was devel-
oped as a counter to Parthian arrows around the time of the campaign of
Corbulo. The outcome of the Armenian war was that the Romans and
Parthians signed a treaty agreeing to the establishment of an independent
Arsacid dynasty in Armenia as a buffer state, but with the succession subject
to Roman approval.
Vologases I may also be significant in the history of Mazdaism and the
beginnings of its transition into the modern religion of Zoroastrianism.
Later Zoroastrian texts say that a king Valkash (they do not specify which
one—several Arsacid kings took that name) was the first to tell the Magian
priests to bring together all the oral and written traditions of their religion
and record them systematically. This began the process that, several cen-
turies later, led to the assembly of the texts of the Avesta and the other holy
scriptures of Zoroastrianism.7 If indeed it was Vologases I who gave out
those instructions (a conjecture supported by the fact that his brother Tiri-
dates was known also for his Mazdaean piety8), it would perhaps fit with
other decisions and policies during his reign, which seem consistently to
have stressed a desire to reassert the Iranian character of the state. Vologases
I is believed to have built a new capital named after himself near Seleuceia
and Ctesiphon, with the aim of avoiding the Greek character of those places.
Some of his coins were struck with lettering in Aramaic script (the script in
which the Parthian language was usually written) rather than in Greek, as
had been the case before. And there are suggestions also that he was hostile
to the Jews, which was atypical in the Arsacid period.9 Although his imme-
diate successors did not follow through with all of these novelties, they do
prefigure the policies of the Sassanids. The gradual erosion of Greek influ-
ence and the strengthening of Iranian identity are features of the reigns after
Vologases I.
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The Iranian Revival 41

S OL I NVICTUS
Something else taken west by the Roman soldiers from their encounters in
the east was a new religion—Mithraism. Having been one of the subordi-
nate deities of Mazdaism in the Achaemenid period, Mithras became the
central god of a religion in its own right after his transition westward (in the
west he became known as Mithras rather than Mithra). It may be that his
significance had grown in a particular context or location in Persia or Asia
Minor at an earlier stage, and some have suggested that the cult was a wholly
new one that took little from Persia beyond the name.10 As worshipped in
the west, Mithras always remained primarily a god of soldiers (which may
point up a connection with the Parthian wars) and was an important bond-
ing element in the lives of military men who might find themselves sepa-
rated from friends and familiar places again and again in the course of their
lives, as they were posted from place to place. Although Mithras was associ-
ated with the sun (sol invictus—the Invincible Sun), Mithraism seems to
have taken on some of the ritualized cult character of Western paganism,
losing most of the ethical content of Iranian Mazdaism and becoming a
kind of secret society a little like the Freemasons. Its tenets included secret
ceremonies (mysteries), initiation rites, and a hierarchy of grades of mem-
bership. The underground temples of Mithras are found all over the empire,
as far away from Iran as by the Walbrook in London and at Carrawburgh
(Roman Brocolitia) on Hadrian’s Wall. The period of the cult’s early popu-
larity and spread was the first century ad.
Mithraism joins the list of important religious and intellectual influences
from the Iranian lands on the West. It is thought to have had an important
influence on the early Christian church, as the Christian bishops made con-
verts and tried to make the new religion as acceptable as possible to former
pagans (though the rise of Mithraism only narrowly predates the rise of
Christianity). Mithras’s followers believed he was born on December 25, of a
virgin (though some accounts say he was born from a rock), with shepherds
as his first worshippers. His rites included a kind of baptism and a sacramen-
tal meal. Other aspects of the cult reflected its Mazdaean origins—Mithras
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42 A History of Iran

was believed to have killed a bull as a sacrifice, and it was from the blood of
that bull that all other living things emerged. Mithras was the ally of Ahura
Mazda against the evil principle in the world, Ahriman.
In the following century the great soldier-emperor Trajan managed to
break the strategic logjam in the East with a new invasion of Mesopotamia,
after the Parthian Vologases III had given him a pretext by deposing one
ruler of Armenia and appointing another, whom the Romans did not like.
Instead of trying to toil south in the heat toward Ctesiphon on foot, under a
hail of arrows, in ad 115 Trajan put his men and equipment into boats and
ran them downstream through Mesopotamia along the river Tigris. When
they reached Ctesiphon and Seleuceia, they drove off the Parthian defenders
and applied the most refined techniques of Roman siege engineering. The
twin capital fell, and Trajan annexed the provinces of Mesopotamia to the
Roman Empire. He marched his men as far as the shore of the Persian Gulf
and would have liked to go farther, emulating Alexander. But in 116 he fell
ill while besieging Hatra, which his armies had bypassed earlier. A year later,
he died.
Trajan’s conquests, although impressive enough to win him the title
Parthicus, could not destroy the centers of Parthian power further east. In
the end, they proved to be little more permanent than the Parthian conquests
of Pacorus and Labienus in Palestine and Asia Minor of 40 bc. Before Trajan
died, the Romans had been assailed by revolts in Mesopotamia and else-
where in their eastern provinces. His successor, Hadrian, abandoned Trajan’s
conquests in Armenia and Mesopotamia and made peace with the Parthian
king Osroes (Khosraw) on the basis of the old frontier on the Euphrates
River. Nonetheless, Trajan had overcome the ghost of Carrhae and had
shown his successors how to crack the strategic problem of Mesopotamia.
It may be that the Trajanic invasion marks the beginning of a decline of
the Arsacids, and it is certainly plain that Mesopotamia had ceased to be the
secure possession it had been before. Over the next century, Roman armies
penetrated to Seleuceia/Ctesiphon twice more—in ad 165 (under Verus)
and in 199 (under Septimus Severus). But over the same period the Parthi-
ans fought back hard (assisted in 165/166 by the outbreak of a disease
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The Iranian Revival 43

among the Romans that may have been smallpox), and made their own in-
cursion into Syria.
In 216, at the instigation of Emperor Caracalla, the Romans again in-
vaded, but got no farther than Arbela (Irbil/Hewler). Caracalla was one of
the most brutal of the Roman emperors (in 215 he had massacred thou-
sands of people in Alexandria because the citizens were reported to have
ridiculed him). While relieving himself on the side of a road near Carrhae,
he was apparently stabbed to death by his own bodyguards. The Parthians
under Artabanus (Ardavan) IV then struck back at the Romans under
Caracalla’s successor, Macrinus, and inflicted a heavy defeat on them at Nis-
ibis. After that, in 218, Macrinus had to yield up a heavy war reparation that
cost two hundred million sesterces (according to Dio Cassius) to secure
peace.
Whatever the precise effect of the wars on the Arsacid monarchy, they
must have been exhausting and damaging—especially in Mesopotamia and
the northwest, which would always have been, in good times, some of the
wealthiest provinces of the empire. There had always been vicious and pro-
tracted succession disputes among the Arsacids, thanks mostly to the nature
of court politics and, perhaps, the effect of the involvement of a group of no-
ble families (central to Arsacid rule seems to have been alliances with a small
group of wealthy families, including those of the Suren, Karen, and
Mehran). But these difficult succession struggles seem also to have grown
more frequent and intractable, exacerbating a falling-off of the authority of
the monarchy.

The Persian Revival

Early in the third century ad a new power began to arise in the province of
Persis—Fars, the province from which the Achaemenids had emerged. A
family owing allegiance to the Arsacids came to prominence as local rulers
there, but in April 224 the latest head of this family, having broadened his
support to include the cities of Kerman and Isfahan, led an army against
Artabanus IV and killed him in battle at Hormuzdgan near Shushtar in
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44 A History of Iran

Khuzestan. This victor’s name was Ardashir, a reference back to the name
Artakhshathra (Artaxerxes), the name of several of the Achaemenid kings.
Ardashir claimed Achaemenid descent, probably to disguise the more re-
cent, relatively humble origins of his family (who called themselves Sas-
sanids, after a predecessor called Sasan).
Ardashir also made a strong association between his cause and that of the
form of Mazdaism followed in Fars (his father, Papak, had been a priest of
Anahita at the religious center of Istakhr). The downfall of Artabanus was
later celebrated in a dramatic rock-carving at Ferozabad, which showed Ar-
dashir and his followers on galloping chargers, striking the Parthian king
and his men from their horses with their lances.
The Arsacid regime did not collapse immediately, and their coins were
still minted in Mesopotamia until 228. But in 226 Ardashir had himself
crowned King of Kings after taking Ctesiphon, and within a few years he
controlled all the territory of the former Parthian Empire. That fact alone
suggests that several of the great Parthian families (whose local rulerships
are known to have persisted long after 224) cooperated in the change of
dynasty.
Ardashir was determined from the beginning that his new dynasty would
assert and justify itself in a new way. His coins (and those of his successors)
bore inscriptions in Persian script instead of the Greek used on Arsacid
coins, and on the reverse showed a Mazdaean fire temple. The Sassanids
were to be Iranian, Mazdaean kings before all else. In another massively im-
pressive rock-carving at Naqsh-e Rostam near Persepolis, Ardashir is shown
on horseback receiving the symbol of his kingship from Ormuzd (the name
of Ahura Mazda in Middle Persian). Artabanus IV is depicted crushed be-
neath the feet of Ardashir’s horse, and Ahriman under the hooves of the
horse on which Ormuzd is seated. The message could not be more clear—
Ardashir had been chosen by God. His victory over the last Arsacid had
been assisted by God, and he had overcome Artabanus in a struggle that
paralleled directly that of Ormuzd against Ahriman, the principle of chaos
and evil.11 Coinage inscriptions also declared Ardashir to be of divine de-
scent. This was an innovation with important later resonances.
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The Iranian Revival 45

Paradoxically for this very Iranian monarch, the idea may have originated
in the preceding period of Greek influence. The pattern of a new, autocratic
ruler from more or less obscure origins, taking power by force after a period
of disorder—and claiming the decision of God for his victory and his justi-
fication—has been suggested as a recurring theme in Iranian history by
Homa Katouzian, and perhaps has its archetypal image in this relief carv-
ing.12 The rebellion of Ardashir also, with its heavy religious overtones,
echoes earlier and later religious revolutions in Iran.
This rock-relief at Naqsh-e Rostam also includes the first known inscrip-
tion referring to Iran, though there are references in the Avesta that probably
pre-date the Sassanid period, and the word also appears on Ardashir’s coins.
From other contemporary evidence, the term Iran may refer to the territory
over which those responsible for the inscriptions considered the Mazdaean
religion to be observed. Or it may possibly refer to the territories in which
the Iranian family of languages were spoken (though the inclusion of Baby-
lonia and Mesene within Iran makes this doubtful). Or, perhaps, it signified
something less clearly defined, about people rather than territory, which par-
took of both things.
What is more certain is that alongside the concept of Iran was that of a
non-Iran (Aniran)—territories ruled by the Sassanid shah but not regarded
as Iranian. These included Syria, Cilicia, and Georgia.13 Whatever the pre-
cise significance of these terms, their use on the rock-carving strongly sug-
gests a sense of Iranian identity, perhaps centered on Fars but with
significance much beyond. It also seems unlikely that Ardashir conjured
these concepts from thin air. Their utility for him was as an underpinning
for his royal authority. To be effective for that purpose, they must have had
some resonance with his subjects—a resonance that touched on an older
sense of land, people, and political culture.
In later years Ardashir attempted to round off his success in taking over
the Parthian Empire by launching attacks on the Romans, along the old
front in upper Mesopotamia and Syria. This suggests that he felt the need to
justify his access to power by success against the Romans and, by extension,
that the Parthians’ perceived failures against the Romans had been part of
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46 A History of Iran

the reason for their downfall. At first impression, the interminable series of
wars between the Roman Empire and Persia (both in the Parthian period
and again in the Sassanid period) look almost inexplicable. They went on
and on, century after century. There was a potential economic gain for both
sides—the disputed provinces were rich provinces. But it was evident, cer-
tainly by the time of Ardashir, that the wars were very costly, that it would
be very difficult indeed for either party to deliver a knockout blow to the
other, and that any gains would be difficult for either side to hold perma-
nently. The wars and the disputed provinces had taken on a totemic value—
they had become part of the apparatus by which Persian shahs and Roman
emperors alike justified their rule. This explains their personal participation
in the campaigns, the triumphs in Rome and the rock-reliefs carved on the
hillsides of Fars. Upper Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Syria had become an
unfortunate playground for princes.
Ardashir was not initially successful in his wars against the Romans, but
after some years he was able to retake Nisibis and Carrhae. In his last years
he ruled jointly with his son Shapur, who succeeded him after his death in
241. And it was Shapur who achieved some of the most dramatic successes
of the long wars with Rome. These began with his defeat of the Romans at
Misikoe in 243, during which the Roman Emperor Gordian was killed. In
244, Shapur accepted the submission of Emperor Philip the Arab and the
cession of Armenia. In 259/260 the Emperor Valerian led an army against
Shapur—but the Persians defeated Valerian west of Edessa and took him
prisoner. These events are commemorated by another mural sculpture at
Naqsh-e Rostam, which shows Shapur on horseback receiving the submis-
sion of both Roman emperors. The inscription claims that Philip paid five
hundred thousand denarii in ransom, and that Shapur captured Valerian in
battle “Ourselves with Our own hands.”14 There are different accounts of
what happened to Valerian thereafter. The more sensational one (from Ro-
man sources) is that after some years of humiliation the former emperor was
eventually flayed alive; his skin was then stuffed with straw and exhibited as
a reminder of the superiority of Persian arms. Anthony Hecht wrote a poem
based on this story, from which the following is an excerpt:
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The Iranian Revival 47

. . . A hideous life-sized doll, filled out with straw,

In the skin of the Roman Emperor, Valerian . . .
Swung in the wind on a rope from the palace flag-pole
And young girls were brought there by their mothers
To be told about the male anatomy. . . .15

But the inscription at Naqsh-e Rostam says the Roman captives were set-
tled in various places around the empire, and there is evidence of this at
Bishapur and Shushtar, where the Romans showed their engineering exper-
tise by building a combined bridge and dam, the remains of which can still
be seen (along with other Roman-built bridges elsewhere). It may be that
Valerian, rather than surviving only as a stuffed skin to be giggled at, lived
out his days as pontifex maximus of a Persian city. Given the other evidence of
Shapur’s generally humane conduct (and the spirit of the Naqsh-e Rostam
relief itself, which seems to show magnanimity rather than brutal humilia-
tion of the enemy), it may be that the former story is just a rather gruesome
fable, reported by uncritical Roman historians who had no idea what really
had become of Valerian after his capture, but were ready to believe the worst
of the Persians. Large numbers of ordinary people, including many Chris-
tians from Antioch and elsewhere, were brought back and settled in Persia
by Shapur after his campaigns. In addition to the wars with Rome, both Ar-
dashir and Shapur campaigned in the east against the Kushans, eventually
establishing Sassanid rule over large parts of what are now Central Asia, Af-
ghanistan, and northern India.
Ardashir and Shapur made changes in government that may have paral-
leled the beginnings of some deeper changes in society. Government became
more centralized, the bureaucracy expanded, and from the devolved system
of the Parthians (sometimes, probably misleadingly, described as a kind of
feudalism) a new pattern evolved.16 New offices and titles appeared in in-
scriptions, including dibir (scribe), ganzwar (treasurer), and dadwar (judge).
The old Parthian families continued, but were given court offices and may
thereby, one may say, have been domesticated (a change reminiscent of the
way in which Louis XIV of France tamed the French nobility after the
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48 A History of Iran

Fronde civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century). This change in role for
the great nobles may in time have helped initiate another phenomenon of
social, cultural, and military significance: the emergence of a class of gentry,
the dehqans, who in later centuries controlled the countryside, its villages,
and its peasantry on the shah’s behalf, and provided the armored cavalry that
were the central battle-winning weapon of the Sassanid armies. (Though in
the interim the great noble families retained much of their power in the
provinces, and the cavalry were provided in large part by their retainers—as
in the time of the Parthians.)
In several other ways the long reign of Shapur continued and fulfilled the
policies set in motion by Ardashir. Following the precedent of his father at
Ferozabad and elsewhere, Shapur was also a great founder of cities—Bisha-
pur and Nishapur, among others. The establishment of these cities17 and the
growth of old ones, abetted by the expansion of trade within and beyond the
large empire (especially along the silk routes as well as, increasingly, by sea to
India and China), brought about changes in the Persian economy. Bazaars of
the kind familiar later, in the Islamic period, grew up in the cities—a home
to merchants and artisans, who formed trade guilds. Agriculture expanded
to meet the demand for food from the towns, and nomadic pastoralism re-
ceded in significance. The spread of land under cultivation was facilitated by
the use of qanat—underground irrigation canals that carried water as far as
several kilometers, from highland areas to villages. There it could be distrib-
uted to fields. Agriculture was also expanded in Mesopotamia, where, if
properly irrigated, the rich soils of the great river valley were potentially very
productive, capable of yielding several crops a year.
Culturally, the resettlement of Greeks, Syrians, and others from the Ro-
man Empire brought in a renewed burst of interest in Greek learning, and
new translations into Pahlavi were carried out (Pahlavi was the Middle Per-
sian language spoken in the Sassanid period, simplified from the more
grammatically complex Old Persian spoken in Achaemenid times). Eventu-
ally, recognized schools of learning, including those for medicine and other
sciences, flourished in cities like Gondeshapur and Nisibis. Inscriptions also
record Shapur’s pious establishment of fire altars named for various mem-
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The Iranian Revival 49

bers of his family. Each altar would have involved an endowment to support
the priests and their families. These endowments, along with similar ones
established by the great nobles, enhanced the economic and political power
of the priests (mobad).

Dark Prophet
Another phenomenon that emerged in the reign of Shapur was a new reli-
gion—Manichaeism, named after its originator, the prophet Mani. Aside
from a more or less vague idea of a dualistic division between good and evil,
Mani and his doctrines are obscure to most people today. But on closer
examination Mani’s ideas and his movement turn out to have been enor-
mously influential, especially in medieval Europe.
Mani was born in April 216 in Parthian Mesopotamia, of Iranian parents
descended from a branch of the Arsacid royal family, who had moved there
from Hamadan/Ecbatana. There is a story that he was born lame, and some
have suggested that his pessimism and his disgust at the human body had
something to do with that. As with other founders of world religions, Mani
was born into a troubled time and place. His parents seem to have been
Christians,18 and he was strongly influenced by gnostic ideas in his formative
years. (The gnostics were an important sect of early Christianity, though
some believe their ideas pre-date Christianity, incorporating Platonic ideas.
Similar movements in Judaism and even, later, Islam have been identified
and labelled gnostic. Broadly, they believed in a secret knowledge—gnosis—
that derived from a personal, direct experience with the divine.) At some
point before about 240, Mani claimed to have received a revelation that told
him not to eat meat or drink wine or to sleep with women. The doctrine of
Mani incorporated Christian elements, but depended heavily on a creation
myth (if it can be called that) derived from Mazdaean concepts, particularly
the pessimistically and deterministically inclined forms of the branch of
Mazdaism called Zurvanism. This had been particularly important in Mes-
opotamia for several centuries, drawing on indigenous traditions like that of
astrology.
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50 A History of Iran

Put simply, Manichaeism was based on the idea of a queasy, dystopic cre-
ation in which the good—the light—had been overwhelmed and domi-
nated by evil—the demonic—which was itself identified with matter.
Through copulation and reproduction (inherently sinful), evil had impris-
oned light in matter and had established the dominance of evil on earth. Je-
sus was able to liberate man from this miserable condition, but only briefly,
and the only real hope was the eventual liberation of the spirit in death. This
dismal and ugly vision of existence was presented as a religion of liberation
from material existence and evil. Mani wrote down a series of religious texts
and liturgies, many of which were quite beautiful. After a meeting with Sha-
pur in 243 at which Mani impressed the shah favorably,19 Mani was allowed
to preach the new religion all over the Sassanid Empire. Presumably the
king failed to question him too closely—Shapur was distinguished by a tol-
erant attitude to all religions, including Judaism and Christianity. It is
tempting to wish that he had made an exception in Mani’s case. Mani ac-
companied Shapur in some of the campaigning that year against the Ro-
mans, which is coincidental because the great Neoplatonist, Plotinus, was
apparently accompanying the Roman emperor through the same campaign,
on the other side.
The teachings of Mani spread rapidly and widely—beyond Persia into In-
dia, Europe, and Central Asia. They survived longest in Central Asia, as an
open rather than a persecuted, underground movement, and there yielded
most of the authoritative texts from which Manichaeism is understood by ac-
ademics today. Mani organized teams of scribes to translate and copy his
writings into different languages.20 His followers formed a hierarchy of be-
lievers, with an exclusive elect of pharisaic priests at their head. These were
the people who followed the purity rules and the rules of abstinence and
chastity and other life-hating mumbo jumbo to their fullest extent. But the
sect was generally despised and declared heretical—especially by the Maz-
daean Magi, but also by the Jews, the Christians, and even by gnostics like the
Mandaeans. Eventually, Mani returned from his travels (after Shapur’s
death) to a less tolerant atmosphere, and the Magi—who hated Mani more
than anyone else because of his subversion and distortion of their own be-
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The Iranian Revival 51

liefs—were able to have him imprisoned. In February 277 Mani was killed by
being crushed over a period of twenty-six days by some very heavy chains.
By the time of Mani’s death, though, the damage was done. It would be
foolish to attribute all the evils of religion to Mani, but he does seem to have
done a remarkably good job of infecting a range of belief systems with the
most damaging and depressing ideas about impurity, the corruption of ma-
terial existence, and the sinfulness of sexual pleasure. Of course, some of his
notions were useful also to those wishing to elaborate metaphysically upon
misogynistic impulses, and to those with a deterministic bent. His thinking
was a kind of Pandora’s box of malignity, the particles from which went flut-
tering off in all directions on their misshapen wings. As the scholar of Per-
sian religion Alessandro Bausani said, Mani seems to have constructed
myths out of a sense of the “monstrosity of existence”:

. . . myths that have the particularly unpleasant characteristic of not being nat-
ural and rising from below . . . not based on a wide-ranging religious sociality
like the Zoroastrian ones, for they are almost the personal dreams of an ex-
hausted and maniacal intellectual.21

But his ideas were complex, varied, and innovative, and not all bad. They
may later have had some influence on Islam—Mani, like Mohammad in the
seventh century, declared himself to be the “seal of the prophets,” and there
are other parallels.22 But the central tenets of Islam were intrinsically anti-
Manichaean in spirit, and the Prophet Mohammad, speaking of various
sects and faiths, was clear that “All will be saved except one: that of the
Manichaeans.”23 Despite the condemnation heaped upon Mani’s teachings,
they seem to have persisted among an underground sect. But the most star-
tling story is that of Mani’s influence in the West.
Of all the fathers of the Christian church, probably the most influential
was St. Augustine of Hippo. Augustine wrote wonderful books that ex-
plained the Christian religion to the uneducated—explained the downfall of
the Roman Empire in Christian terms, absolving the Christians of blame
(some, like Gibbon, have remained unconvinced); Augustine also explained in
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52 A History of Iran

touching and humane terms his own life, his own sense of sin, and his own
(late) conversion to Christianity (“O Lord, Make me chaste—but not yet”).
Augustine’s presence in the thought of the church in later centuries was domi-
nant. He also explained the reasons Manichaeism was heretical in a Christian
context. But the remarkable fact is, before he converted to Christianity, Au-
gustine himself had been an avowed Manichaean, had converted others to the
sect, and may have served as a Manichaean priest. It has been disputed, but
the imprint of Manichaeism on Augustine’s thinking is obvious and heavy.
Many of the ideas that Augustine’s teaching successfully fixed in Catholic
Christian doctrine—notably that of original sin (strongly associated by him
with sexuality), predestination, the idea of an elect of the saved, and (notori-
ously) the damnation of unbaptized infants—originated at least partly in
debates that had been going on earlier within the Christian church, though
those discussions had been influenced by similar gnostic ideas to those
which had inspired Mani. But many of these key concepts—especially the
central one, original sin—also show a striking congruence with Manichaean
doctrine. Surely Augustine could not successfully have foisted upon the
Christian church Manichaean ideas that the church had already declared
heretical? Yet that seems to have been what happened, and Augustine was
accused of doing precisely this by contemporaries—notably by the apostle
of free will, Pelagius, who in the early years of the fifth century fought long
and hard with Augustine over precisely these theological problems. Pelagius
lost, and was himself declared a heretic. It was perhaps the most damaging
decision ever made by the Christian church.24
As pursued later by the Western Christian church in medieval Europe, the
full grim panoply of Manichaean/Augustinian formulae emerged to blight
millions of lives, and they are still exerting their sad effect today—the dis-
taste for the human body, the disgust for and guilt about sexuality, the misog-
yny, the determinism (and the tendency toward irresponsibility that emerges
from it), the obsessive idealization of the spirit, the disdain for the material—
all distant indeed from the original teachings of Jesus. One could argue that
the extreme Manichaean duality of evil materiality versus good spirituality
emerged most strongly in heresies like those of the Cathars and the Bogomils
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The Iranian Revival 53

that the church pursued most energetically (the same Bogomils from whom
the English language acquired the term “bugger”). The great scholar and Per-
sianist Bausani (from whom I have taken much of my account of
Manichaean beliefs) doubted the connection with these Western heresies,25
but many of their beliefs and practices showed a close identity with those of
Manichaeism, which is not easily discounted. The ferocity of the medieval
church’s persecution of the Cathars and others derived really from the dan-
gerous similarity between the heretics’ doctrines and the orthodox ones—
they had merely carried orthodox doctrine to its logical extreme. The church
was trying to destroy its own ugly shadow. The Eastern Orthodox Church,
sensibly, never embraced Augustinian theology to the same extent.
The real opponent to Augustinian orthodoxy was Pelagianism—a
simple, natural golden thread, sometimes concealed, running through me-
dieval thought, to emerge again in Renaissance humanism. If ever a Christian
thinker deserved to be made a saint, then surely Pelagius did. If ever a pair of
thinkers deserved Nietzsche’s title Weltverleumder26 (world-slanderers), then
they were Mani and Augustine.
To return to Persia from this excursion, we should remember that
Manichaeism was condemned by the Mazdaean Magi as a heresy at an early
stage, and that it is more correct to see it as a distortion of Iranian thinking—
or indeed as an outgrowth of Christian gnosticism dressed in Mazdaean
trappings—than as representative of anything enduring in Iranian thought.

Renewed War
Shapur’s defeats of the Romans had contributed to the near-collapse of the
Roman Empire in the third century. For a while after the capture of Valerian
in 260 the Romans were in no fit state to strike back, and it seemed as if the
whole East was open to Persian conquest. But a new power arose in the vac-
uum, based on the Syrian city of Palmyra. It was led by Septimius Ode-
nathus, a Romanized Arab, and his wife Zenobia (Zeinab).
Odenathus swept through the Roman provinces of the East, and some
Western sources have suggested that he campaigned successfully in the
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54 A History of Iran

western part of the Sassanid Empire as well, though this has been disputed.
Odenathus was assassinated in about 267 and was succeeded by Zenobia,
who conquered Egypt in 269 but was defeated by the emperor Aurelian in
273. Aurelian restored the fortunes of Rome in the region. By that time Sha-
pur was dead; he probably died of illness in Bishapur in May 270, though
some have put his death in ad 272.27 In any case, his reign had boosted the
prestige of the Sassanid dynasty enormously, and had established the Per-
sian Empire as the equal of Rome in the East.
After Shapur’s death several of his sons reigned for short periods in suc-
cession, and a Mazdaean priest named Kerdir gradually strengthened his
position at court. Kerdir used this position to begin asserting Mazdaean or-
thodoxy more aggressively, achieving not just the death of Mani and the per-
secution of his followers, but also the persecution of Jews, Christians,
Buddhists, and others. Not for the last time the over-involvement of reli-
gious leaders in Iranian politics led to the persecution of minorities (and
perhaps too, at length, to the discrediting of the persecutors).
In 283 the Romans invaded Persian territory again, and the outcome of
the war was a new settlement, dividing Armenia between the two rival em-
pires and losing some frontier provinces that Shapur had conquered. The
Persians made further concessions in 298 after some less-than-successful
fighting under Narseh, another of Shapur’s sons (who had ascended to the
throne in the wake of the Kerdir episode). The peace treaty signed then
lasted for many years, and Armenia was confirmed as an Arsacid kingdom
under Roman protection. A rock-relief at Naqsh-e Rostam shows Narseh
being invested with royalty by Anahita, the traditional patroness of the Sas-
sanids. It has been suggested that this signified a post-Kerdir return to a tra-
ditional, more tolerant religious policy.28
In 310 a young boy ascended the throne as Shapur II, after some dispute
over the succession. He reigned a long time, until 379. One notable aspect of
this reign is that it appears to have consolidated the process of revision, col-
lation, and codification that the Mazdaean religion had been undergoing
since the accession of Ardashir, and perhaps before. According to a later
Zoroastrian tradition, Ardashir had instructed his high priest to reassemble
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The Iranian Revival 55

and complete the dispersed fragments of text and oral tradition that had
been preserved. Shapur I ordered that these should be augmented by all the
knowledge of science, philosophy, and other fields that could be gathered
from sources outside Persia—notably from India and Greece. Finally, Sha-
pur II organized an extended discussion and debate between the various
disputing sects of Mazdaism in order to establish a single, authorized doc-
trine. A priest called Adhurpat endured an ordeal by fire to prove the valid-
ity of his arguments. Because he emerged safely, he was permitted to make
final liturgical additions to the Avesta. This seems to have been the decisive
moment at which the previous differences were resolved and Zoroastrian re-
ligion coalesced from its previous disparate elements into a single, unitary
orthodoxy—from which, in turn, modern Zoroastrianism derives. From
this point on, and acknowledging the arbitrariness of choosing any particu-
lar time to mark what was a gradual transition, it makes sense to speak of
Zoroastrianism rather than Mazdaism.29
Shortly before Shapur II became shah, Armenia turned Christian, at least
officially. During Shapur’s reign the Emperor Constantine designated Chris-
tianity the official religion of the Roman Empire too, claiming to be the pro-
tector of all Christians everywhere. Thus Christians within Persia became
suspect as potential spies and traitors, and this tense situation gradually made
the previous tolerance of most of the earlier Sassanid kings difficult to sus-
tain. The new orthodoxy of Zoroastrianism, with its political connections
and influence, became intolerant of rivals within Persia, and religious strife
resulted. Tension also increased because Constantine was keeping at his
court one of Shapur’s brothers, Hormuzd, as a potential claimant to the Per-
sian throne. After learning the trade of war in campaigns against the Arabs
(in which he was successful, resettling some defeated tribes to Khuzestan),
Shapur II demanded the restitution of the provinces won by Shapur I in
northern Mesopotamia and subsequently lost by his successors. War with
Rome broke out again, rolling back and forth between 337 and 359, and the
Persians eventually took Amida (modern Diyarbakir in Turkey).
In 363 the Emperor Julian, one of the most interesting of the later Roman
emperors—a scholar and a pagan who did his best to overturn Constantine’s
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56 A History of Iran

establishment of Christianity in the empire—launched a campaign to re-

store Rome’s position in Syria, and to put the Persians in their place. Ac-
companied by the pretender Hormuzd, Julian, who had been a successful
military commander in the West, brought an army of some eighty thousand
men down the Euphrates as far as Ctesiphon. But he was dissuaded from a
siege and, perhaps by accident, burned his boats. Soon the problems of heat,
thirst, supply, and demoralization began to bite in a way that Crassus would
have found familiar, and the Romans retreated. Eventually Julian was killed
in battle and his successor, Jovian, made a peace that was favorable to the
Persians. This treaty restored the frontiers as they had been at the end of the
reign of Shapur I, with a few additions. Shapur II was also given a free hand
in Armenia, which he proceeded to annex, but desultory fighting continued
until his death in 379. The achievements of Shapur II’s reign are all the
more remarkable for the fact that, at several points, he had to switch fronts
to the East to deal with attacks from the Chionite Huns, who had estab-
lished themselves in Transoxiana and Bactria.30

Strife, Revolution, and Free Love

Shapur II was a strong, successful king with enormous prestige. But his suc-
cessors, who inclined to tolerance of religious minorities, a peace-oriented
foreign policy, and in some cases measures to uphold justice and protect the
poor, had trouble restraining a priesthood and a noble class who were in-
clined—or maybe even conditioned—to intolerance and war, and who dis-
liked any attempt to mitigate their social supremacy. Ardashir II, Shapur
III, and Bahram IV were all murdered or died in suspicious circumstances
(Bahram was shot full of arrows by mutinous commanders).31 Their succes-
sor, Yazdegerd I, ruled from 399 and kept a peace with the Romans through-
out his reign—so much so that the Roman Emperor of the East, Arcadius,
asked him to become the guardian of his son, Theodosius. This gesture
neatly symbolized the parity of the two empires, which now entered on a
phase of partnership. Shahs and emperors cooperated (albeit warily and at a
distance) against the internal and external instabilities that menaced them
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The Iranian Revival 57

both. The heroic period of ambition-driven warfare was over, and even when
war broke out again between the two empires in the sixth century, it was
waged not by glory-hungry emperors, but by their generals.
Yazdegerd I also followed a tolerant religious policy. He was friendly to
the Jews (who hailed him as the new Cyrus) and employed Jewish officials.
It was during his reign that a distinct Persian Christianity emerged to be-
come what is normally called the Nestorian church, the first synod of which
was held in ad 410. This measure would have had the obvious effect of de-
taching Persian Christians from the taint of being a fifth column for the Ro-
mans. But not everyone approved. These religious policies made the shah
unpopular with the clergy, and Yazdegerd, like his immediate predecessors,
was murdered. The fact that his name was taken up by several later succes-
sors suggests that his memory was nonetheless respected in court circles.
The reigns following that of Shapur II are significant because they indi-
cate the emergence of a theory of kingship that went beyond a system of al-
liance or identification with a particular religion or class, to assert that the
shah had a duty to uphold justice for all his subjects. That such a theory ex-
isted we know from post-Islamic sources, who advised rulers of later times
on the basis of patterns and ideas that had been the standard under the Sas-
sanids. The king ruled on the basis of divine grace (kvarrah in Middle Per-
sian/Pahlavi—a concept that goes back to the Avesta and the Achaemenid
period, evidenced primarily by success in war) and was allowed to raise taxes
and keep soldiers, but only on the basis that he ruled justly and not tyranni-
cally. Injustice and tyranny would break the peace that permitted productive
agriculture and trade. That in turn would reduce the tax yield, lessen the
king’s ability to reward soldiers, and threaten the stability of his rule. Justice
was the key that turned a vicious circle into a virtuous circle. But in practice,
the attempts of a king like Yazdegerd to rule justly, according to his judg-
ment, might not accord with the ideas of the Zoroastrian priests. The ab-
stract principle could be used as a weapon by either side.
After some confusion, Yazdegerd was succeeded by his son, Bahram V, also
known as Bahram Gur (wild ass) after his enthusiasm for hunting those ani-
mals. Bahram became a legendary figure, around whom many popular stories
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58 A History of Iran

were told. They elaborated on his love of women, music, and poetry, as well as
on his generosity and bravery. He had been brought up in Hira by an Arab
foster father, and there is evidence that the over-mighty clergy may have dis-
liked this. In war, Bahram Gur was successful at protecting Persian frontiers in
the East, re-establishing Persian control of Armenia, and making a treaty with
the Romans that provided for religious tolerance in both empires. But his love
of hunting was his downfall. He is believed to have disappeared into quick-
sand after a mishap while pursuing game in marshland in Media in 438/439.
Yazdegerd II, who succeeded Bahram Gur, seems to have been a ruler
more to the liking of the Zoroastrian priesthood. He attempted to re-impose
Zoroastrianism on Armenia, provoking a civil war there. He seems also to
have permitted renewed persecution of Christians and Jews in Persia proper.
Touraj Daryaee, an expert on Sassanid Persia, suggests that Yazdegerd II
also inclined to the more east Persian kingly mythology, derived from the
Avesta and its references to the Kayanid kings, rather than to the west Per-
sian sub-Achaemenid version.32
Throughout this period the threat from northern and eastern tribal no-
mads intensified (the Romans came under the same pressure, which is one
reason the wars with Rome abated at this time). Yazdegerd II was successful
against them for the most part, but in 454 he was forced to retreat. He died
three years later. After a dynastic struggle, his son Peroz (Feruz) gained the
throne with the help of the people known as the Hephtalite Huns. But the
Hephtalites captured him in battle in 469, and Peroz was forced to pay a
huge ransom, and to yield territory, in return for his release. This was also a
time of hardship, drought, and famine. Peroz renewed the struggle with the
Hephtalites in 484 but was killed in battle, and the Persians were utterly de-
feated. His successor could only fend off his eastern enemies by paying them
tribute, and he was eventually deposed.
Kavad I came to the throne in 488 at a time of crisis. The Hephtalites
had sliced off a swath of Persia’s eastern provinces. Repeated famines, the ex-
actions of the arrogant nobility, and taxes required to make tribute pay-
ments had reduced the peasantry to a miserable state. Provinces in the west
and southwest were in revolt.
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The Iranian Revival 59

Then, on top of all this, a version of the Manichaean heresy reappeared in

a new, revolutionary movement. Its members preached that since wealth and
desire for women caused all the trouble in the world, wealth should be dis-
tributed equally—and women should be held in common. (The latter is of-
ten thought to have been exaggerated by the sect’s enemies, but there is
evidence that “shrines and inns” were established where people could meet
and make love freely.)33 The movement has been named Mazdakism after its
leader, Mazdak, though some have doubted how central to the phenomenon
Mazdak actually was. Kavad himself was apparently converted to the new be-
liefs, having seen an opportunity to humble the nobles and the clergy. Grana-
ries were thrown open to the people, and land was redistributed. But the
nobility and clergy managed to overcome Kavad, imprison him, and replace
him with his more malleable brother. The country (especially Mesopotamia,
but also other parts) was in turmoil. Eventually, Kavad was able to escape
from prison and, with the help of the Hephtalites, reimpose his authority.
The Arab historian Al-Tabari wrote that Kavad escaped through the in-
tervention of his daughter, who went to the prison commander and said she
would allow him to sleep with her if she could see her father.34 She stayed
with Kavad for one day, then left in the company of a sturdy servant, who
was carrying a rolled-up carpet. The commander asked about the carpet, but
the girl told him it was the one she had slept on, and since she was having
her period, she was going to wash it and bring it back. The commander let
the girl go on her way, neglecting to investigate the carpet further “lest he be-
come polluted by it.” But once the girl and the servant were out of the prison,
Kavad rolled out of the carpet and they all escaped to the Hephtalites. The
superstitious taboo about the impurity of menstrual blood was to prove
damaging to the nobles and the clergy. There is a kind of cosmic justice to it.
In the remainder of Kavad’s reign, and in that of his son and successor
Khosraw (531–579), the two kings pushed through a number of important
reforms that established the Sassanid Empire in something like its final shape.
Both kings exploited the chaos caused by the Mazdakite revolution to dimin-
ish the power of the nobility and the clergy (this came across most clearly in
Kavad’s later years, when Khosraw’s succession was in question—the clergy
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60 A History of Iran

and nobility were forced to support Khosraw for fear that another of
Kavad’s sons, a pro-Mazdakite, would become shah). Perhaps most impor-
tantly, the taxation system was reformed, a poll tax was established, and a
survey of taxable land was carried out to ensure the taxation was equitable.35
The empire was divided into four sectors, each under the command of a mil-
itary commander (spahbod) and supported by a chancery (diwan) that kept
his troops supplied. In addition, a new clerical office was established—a
Protector of the Poor, who reinforced the moral duty of the priesthood to
look after the interests of the lowest strata of society (a duty they had pre-
sumably neglected before). The reforms created, or certainly greatly
strengthened, a new class of dehqans—rural gentry who collected tax in the
villages and were themselves small landowners. The dehqans also provided
the battle-winning Persian cavalry that dominated the shah’s armies. From
now on, though, they were paid and retained by the shah instead of the great
noble families. Identifying closely with the shah’s interest, and providing ad-
ministrators and courtiers as well as soldiers, the dehqan class became the
prime means by which the traditions and culture of Sassanid Persia were
preserved and transmitted onward after the Islamic conquest.
With these reforms well under way by the 520s, Kavad decided that Maz-
dak had outlived his usefulness.36 It seems a debate was organized in order to
discredit his doctrines, at which not just the Zoroastrian clergy but also the
Christians and Jews spoke out against Mazdak. According to the story told
much later by Ferdowsi, Kavad then turned Mazdak and his followers over to
Khosraw, who had the charismatic communist’s people buried alive—
planted head down in a walled orchard, with only their feet showing above
the ground. Khosraw then invited Mazdak to view his garden, telling him,

You will find trees there that no-one has ever seen and no-one ever heard of
even from the mouth of the ancient sages . . .

Mazdak went to the garden and opened the gate, but when he saw the
kind of trees that were planted in Khosraw’s garden he gave a loud cry, and
fainted. Khosraw had him strung up by the feet from a gallows, then killed
him with volleys of arrows. Ferdowsi concluded,
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The Iranian Revival 61

If you are wise, do not follow the path of Mazdak. And so the nobles be-
came secure in their possessions, and women, and children, and their rich
treasures.37

This story may record some aspect of a contemporary memory, and we

know that Ferdowsi worked from much earlier accounts of events. We can-
not be sure how Mazdak died, but the religious revolution associated with
him was an important episode. It did not usher in a new order of shared
property (let alone free love). It did weaken the power of the great nobles
and bring at least some benefits for the lower classes, though the main bene-
ficiaries were the dehqans. But if we look at it another way, it tells us some
important things about the interplay of social and political interests, and the
insurrection itself may appear in a different light. Mazdak and his adherents
seem, at least initially, to have depended heavily on the authority of the king
to get their revolution going. Even if he misjudged the forces that would be
released, Kavad handled events cleverly. He was too important to the clergy
and the nobles, by the time of his imprisonment, for them to simply kill
him. He was the last thing standing between them and utter destruction.
The revolution was an overdue reminder to them of the basis of their privi-
leges and the importance of the monarchy in holding society together. Jus-
tice, even if not perfect (let alone egalitarian), had to be more than
lip-service; and at least the principle of justice gave everyone a legitimate ex-
pectation from the system, if not necessarily a right to be heard. The effect of
the revolution, like most revolutions, was a broadening of the social bases of
political power, releasing new reserves of human energy. The prestige and
power of the monarchy were reaffirmed and enhanced, and it now entered
what came to be regarded as its golden age.

Khosraw Anushirvan
After his accession in 531, Khosraw continued with his father’s reforms, com-
pleting the destruction of the Mazdakites.38 His court became a center for
learning, attracting in particular some of the Greek Neoplatonists whose
school of philosophy had been closed down in Athens by the emperor
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62 A History of Iran

Justinian. But as Gibbon wrote, these were Platonists “whom Plato himself
would have blushed to acknowledge”:

The disappointment of the philosophers provoked them to overlook the real

virtues of the Persians; and they were scandalized, more deeply perhaps than
became their profession, with the plurality of wives and concubines, the inces-
tuous marriages, and the custom of exposing dead bodies to the dogs and vul-
tures, instead of hiding them in the earth, or consuming them with fire. Their
repentance was expressed by a precipitate return, and they loudly declared
that they had rather die on the border of the empire, than enjoy the wealth
and favour of the Barbarian. From this journey, however, they derived a bene-
fit which reflects the purest lustre on the character of Chosroes [Khosraw].
He required, that the seven sages who had visited the court of Persia, should
be exempted from the penal laws which Justinian enacted against his pagan
subjects; and this privilege, expressly stipulated in a treaty of peace, was
guarded by the vigilance of a powerful mediator.39

Khosraw encouraged the translation of texts from the Greek, Indian,

and Syriac languages, and it was apparently in his reign that the game of
chess was introduced from India (and probably somewhat amended). He
instigated the compilation of a history of Persia, and an astronomical al-
manac. He upheld the position of Zoroastrianism in the country, but per-
sonally took a more rationalist approach, based on his reading of
philosophy and of writings from other religions. Through his reputation
for wisdom and justice, Khosraw later acquired the title Anushirvan (Khos-
raw of the Immortal Soul). In the west he was known—partly through his
contact with the Neoplatonists—as the philosopher-king. The Arabs, as
they recorded later, knew him as “The Just.” He established a magnificent
court, and built the palace at Ctesiphon (the great iwan arch of which can
still be seen today) along with spreading gardens and precincts that have
since disappeared. The reign of Khosraw, for its intellectual achievements,
for its exemplification of the Sassanid idea of kingship, was the pinnacle of
Sassanid rule. In later centuries it became almost the Platonic form of what
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The Iranian Revival 63

monarchy should be, even after the Sassanids themselves had long since
disappeared.
Khosraw was also successful in war, defeating not just the Hephtalites
but also the Turks, who had been instrumental in weakening the Hephtal-
ites at an earlier stage and were now pressing on the empire’s northern and
northeastern borders. Following up the successes of his father and his fa-
ther’s spahbod (commander) Azarethes in defeating the great general Belisar-
ius at Nisibis and Callinicum in 530 and 531, Khosraw also fought a series
of wars with the East Romans (hereafter usually called the Byzantines) in
which he was generally successful. The Byzantines renewed treaties accord-
ing to which the Persians, in return for large cash sums, would prevent ene-
mies from invading Asia Minor through the Caucasus. Finally, Khosraw
retook the strategic town of Dara in 572 and was able again to send his
troops raiding into Syria as far as Antioch. The Byzantines made further
truces, buying the Persians off with large sums of gold.40
On Khosraw’s death in 579, his son Hormuzd IV took the throne. Hor-
muzd seems to have done his best to maintain the balance established by his
father—supporting the dehqans against the nobility and defending the rights
of the lower classes, as well as resisting attempts by the clergy to reassert them-
selves. But he resorted to executions to do so, and was remembered accord-
ingly by the Zoroastrians as a cruel and unjust king. In this situation, one of
the generals, Bahram Chubin, who had achieved successes in war in the east,
marched on Ctesiphon after being criticized by Hormuzd for a less-than-
brilliant performance in war in the west. Bahram Chubin was a descendant of
the old Parthian Arsacid line, through the great family of the Mehran. With
the help of other nobles, he deposed, blinded, and later killed Hormuzd, put-
ting Hormuzd’s son, Khosraw II, in power (in about 589/590).
But then Bahram declared himself king, restoring the Arsacid dynasty.
This was too much for the majority of the political class, who held strongly
to the dynastic principle and supported the right of Khosraw II to rule. Af-
ter a reverse that forced him to flee to the west, Khosraw II returned with
the support of the Byzantine emperor, Maurice, and ejected Bahram, who
fled to the territory of the Turks (Turan) and was murdered there.
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64 A History of Iran

Khosraw Parvez
Surviving various further disputes and rebellions among the nobility with
Armenian and Byzantine help, Khosraw II was able to establish his su-
premacy again by 600, and took the title Khosraw Parvez—The Victorious.
The title was to prove apposite, but Khosraw II did not have the vision or
the moral greatness of his namesake, his grandfather. He may even have
been implicated in the murder of his father, and his life was studded with in-
cidents of cruelty and vindictiveness, intensifying as he grew older. He did
everything to excess. He burdened his subjects with increasingly heavy taxa-
tion, accumulating enormous wealth in the process. Although he was re-
membered afterward for the great story of his love for the Christian girl
Shirin, he had an enormous harem of wives, concubines, dancers, musicians,
and other entertainers. When he went hunting he did so in a huge park
stuffed with game of all kinds. At court he sat on a splendid throne, under a
dome across which celestial spheres moved by a hidden mechanism in a
planetarium.
But his greatest excess was in war. In 602 Khosraw II’s benefactor, the
Byzantine emperor Maurice, was murdered and supplanted by a usurper,
Phocas—one account says that Maurice was forced to watch the execution
of his five sons before he himself was killed. The Byzantine territories subse-
quently fell into disorder and civil war, made worse by divisions between
Christian sects. Phocas sent an army against dissenting Christians in Anti-
och, perpetrating a massacre there. At Edessa, a local Byzantine general was
resisting Phocas’s forces. Khosraw used the pretext of Maurice’s murder to
make war against Phocas in revenge, and relieved Edessa. He was able from
there to extend his control over the other Byzantine frontier posts and then,
after some preparation, to unleash his armies on the eastern Byzantine Em-
pire. The Byzantines had been concentrating their efforts on their Danube
frontier against the Avars, and were relatively weak in the east.
By this time (610) Phocas had been deposed by Heraclius, who was to
prove one of the most capable of all Byzantine emperors. Of Armenian de-
scent, Heraclius tried to make peace with the Persians, but Khosraw ignored
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The Iranian Revival 65

him. The able Persian generals Shahrvaraz and Shahin led the Sassanid
armies through Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Syria into Palestine and Asia
Minor. They took Antioch in 611, Damascus in 613, and then Jerusalem in
614 (sending a shock through the whole of the Christian world). At
Jerusalem the Christian defenders refused to give up the city, and it was
taken by assault after three weeks, and given over to sack. According to
Byzantine Christian sources, the Jews of the city and the surrounding region
(who had been persecuted and excluded from the city for centuries) joined
in a massacre in which sixty thousand Christians died.41 The Persians car-
ried off the relic of the True Cross to Ctesiphon. Within another four years
they had conquered Egypt and were in control of most of Asia Minor, as far
as Chalcedon, opposite Constantinople on the shores of the Bosphorus. No
shah of Persia since Cyrus had achieved such military successes.
But then Fortune switched her allegiance. Heraclius made careful prepa-
rations and crystallized the religious dimension of the conflict into a holy
war, devoting himself and his army to God. Later Christian chroniclers in-
cluded his expedition with the descriptions of the Crusades. In a bold move,
in 622 (the same year as the Prophet Mohammad’s flight from Mecca to
Medina) he took a small band of elite troops by water to the southeastern
corner of the Black Sea, bypassing all the Sassanid forces in Asia Minor, and
from there burst into Armenia, deliberately devastating the countryside
everywhere he went. Heraclius managed to keep Shahrvaraz inactive by
sending him letters that suggested Khosraw intended to kill him. With the
support of the Turkish Khazars from north of the Caucasus, the Byzantines
marched on into Azerbaijan and destroyed one of the most sacred Persian
fire temples, at what is today called Takht-e Soleiman (The Throne of
Solomon).
The Persians withdrew from Asia Minor, and in 627 suffered a crushing
defeat at Nineveh. Early the following year, with Heraclius threatening Cte-
siphon, Khosraw II was deposed and his son Kavad II became shah. Kavad
sued for peace, offering the restitution of all the previous Persian conquests,
and this was agreed to in 629. Khosraw, put on trial, was convicted of a
lengthy series of crimes including patricide (his complicity in the murder of
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66 A History of Iran

Hormuzd IV), cruelty toward his subjects (especially soldiers and women),
ingratitude toward the Byzantines, ruinous avarice, and mistreatment of his
own children.42 But Kavad showed himself scarcely more of a just ruler,
murdering all his brothers to eliminate rivals. These killings (which repeated
some of the worst cruelties of the Arsacid period) meant a shortage of can-
didates with obvious legitimacy in the years that followed.
The destruction of the wars had ruined some of the richest provinces of
both empires, and the taxation to pay for them had impoverished the rest.
Turks were on the loose throughout the eastern provinces of Persia, the
Khazars were dominant in the northwest, and the Arabs, with a new deter-
mination and cohesion derived from the message of Mohammad, were raid-
ing and beginning to establish themselves in Mesopotamia. Civil wars broke
out between rival great nobles, and floods broke the irrigation works in Mes-
opotamia, turning productive land into swamps. Plague appeared, killing
many in the western provinces and carrying off Kavad himself. The internal
chaos and infighting brought a succession of short-lived monarchs to the
throne (ten in two years), including the former general Shahrvaraz and two
queens, Purandokht and Azarmedokht (a daughter of Khosrow II, Puran-
dokht attempted some sensible measures to restore order in the empire, but
was removed by another general before she could make much headway). Fi-
nally, in 632, Yazdegerd III, a grandson of Khosraw II, was crowned. He was
eight years old.
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3
Islam and Invasions
The Arabs, Turks, and Mongols—The Iranian
Reconquest of Islam, the Sufis, and the Poets

Dusham gozar oftad be viraneh-e Tus

Didam joghdi neshaste jaye tavus
Goftam che khabar dari az in viraneh
Gofta khabar inast ke afsus afsus

Last night I passed by the ruins of Tus

And saw that an owl had taken the place of the peacock.
I asked, “What news from these ruins?”
It answered, “The news is—Alas, Alas.”
—Attributed to Shahid Balkhi (d. 937).
The owl is a symbol of death.

One of the recurring questions in the history of Iran is the problem of conti-
nuity from pre-Islamic Iran to the Islamic period and to modern times. The
great institutions of Persia as the period of Sassanid rule reached its climax
were the monarchy and the Zoroastrian religion. Both of these were swept
away by the Islamic conquest, and within three centuries there was little ap-
parent remnant of them.

67
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68 A History of Iran

But there are some indisputable facts that point the other way. The first
and most important is the language. The Persian language survived, while
many other languages in the lands the Arabs conquered went under, to be
replaced by Arabic. Persian changed from the Middle Persian, or Pahlavi, of
the Parthian and Sassanid periods, acquired a large number of loan words
from Arabic, and re-emerged after two obscure centuries as the elegantly
simple tongue spoken by Iranians today.1 Some would say that Persian be-
came a new language, much as English was transformed in the Middle Ages
after the Norman conquest. People continued to speak Persian, and Persian
came to be written in Arabic script. Modern Persian is remarkably un-
changed since the eleventh century. The poetry in particular that has come
down from that time is readily understandable by modern Iranians, is stud-
ied in school, and is often quoted from memory.
There is another monument to continuity, itself a nexus of language, his-
tory, folk-memory, and poetry—the Shahnameh (Book of Kings) of Fer-
dowsi. This is the greatest single body of poetry from the period of
transition, containing passages and stories familiar to most Iranians even to-
day. Ferdowsi reworked a traditional canon of stories of the kings and heroes
of Iran that is known in fragments from other sources. He wrote deliber-
ately to preserve, as if in a time capsule, as much as he could of the culture of
pre-Islamic Iran. The language of the stories itself avoids all but a very few of
the Arabic loan words that by Ferdowsi’s time had become almost indispens-
able in everyday usage, especially in written usage. Such is the quality of the
poetry that it influenced almost all subsequent Iranian poets. And the char-
acters of the stories—Kay Kavus, Rostam, Sohrab, Siavosh, Khosraw,
Shirin—are as familiar to Iranians today as in Ferdowsi’s time.
But in discussing Ferdowsi we anticipate events, and to understand him it
is necessary to appreciate the significance of Islam and the history of the first
three centuries of Muslim rule.

Mohammad
The Arabs of Mohammad’s time were not just simple bedouin. Moham-
mad himself was the son of a merchant (born in Mecca sometime around
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Islam and Invasions 69

the year 570), and later he served a rich widow as a guard and leader of her
trading caravans. Eventually, he married her and ran the business himself.
This was a period of change, both social and economic. Towns like Medina
and Mecca had become an important part of life in the Arabian peninsula,
and there was tension between austere nomad values and the more sophis-
ticated urban way of life. This was especially true between the traditional
polytheism of tribes and the monotheism of urban Jews (there were signifi-
cant Jewish communities in the Arabian peninsula—notably at Medina
but also elsewhere). As in Persia, religious ideas traveled through the penin-
sula and beyond with the merchants’ trade goods. Christian hermits rubbed
shoulders with Jews as well as with polytheistic Arabs in the Arabian
towns. Arabs had served both the Sassanids and the Romans as mercenar-
ies, and the Ghassanid and Lakhmid Arab kingdoms had served as buffer
states between the two empires in the south just as Armenia had in the
north. Arabs had settled in the western part of what is now Iraq, and as far
north as Syria.
Muslims believe that Mohammad received his first revelations from the
Angel Gabriel, which appear in the opening five lines of Sura 96 of the
Qor’an, in the hills around Mecca around the year 610. The early revelations
gave the pronouncements of a just God, who at the Day of Judgment would
decide on the basis of men’s actions in life whether they should go to para-
dise or to hell. They condemned false pride, neglect of the poor, and cruelty
to the weak. They emphasized the duty of prayer. Around 613 Mohammad
began preaching the revelation he had received in Mecca, and his reception
there reflected social divisions and tensions. His early converts were mainly
among the poor—among members of weak clans and the younger sons of
richer families. But his preaching threatened the proprietors of the existing
order in Mecca by creating an alternative pole of social authority, and by
condemning the polytheism that among other things gave the ruling fami-
lies an income from religious visitors.
Eventually the hostility to Mohammad from the ruling families of
Mecca made his position there untenable. He fled Mecca, and in 622 was
accepted into Medina by a group of prominent citizens. Life in Medina had
been marred by feuding between rival clans, and it seems that Mohammad’s
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70 A History of Iran

welcome reflected their need for an arbitrator to prevent further strife. As it

turned out, the arrival of Mohammad in Medina signified the acceptance of
a new principle of spiritual leadership—one superseding the previous struc-
ture based on patriarchal kinship relations. The move to Medina is remem-
bered by Muslims as the Hijra, which means “migration,” and has central
importance in the early history of Islam. The migration from Mecca and the
establishment of the Muslim community in Medina provides the date at
which the Muslim calendar begins.
Initially the group around Mohammad was open to Jews and Christians,
but it gradually became clear that the revelation was dictating a new religion
in its own right, distinct from either Judaism or Christianity (though build-
ing on and surpassing the teaching of the prophets of both). Put simply,
Mohammad rejected the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and the Jews re-
jected Mohammad’s presentation of himself as a prophet after the pattern of
the Jewish prophets of the Old Testament.
This was important in Medina because there were three important Jew-
ish tribes there. Early on, Mohammad had given Jerusalem as the direction
of prayer and had made other provisions that apparently conciliated Ju-
daism. The earliest, most essential elements of Islam are strikingly congru-
ent with Judaism in content and significance. But the Jews rejected
Mohammad’s revelation, and relations between them and the Muslims dete-
riorated. The Jewish tribes were accused of treacherous contacts with the
Meccans, and in succession they were ejected from Medina. Their property
was confiscated and the males of the last tribe were massacred after they at-
tempted to betray the Medinans at the Battle of the Trench (ad 627).2 As
the remaining inhabitants were converted, Medina became the model of a
unified Muslim community—the umma.
Islam now took something like its final form, as expressed through the
Qor’an. The faith was based on five pillars: the shahada—the obligation to
acknowledge the existence of one God, with Mohammad as his Prophet;
prayer (salat); almsgiving (zakat); pilgrimage (hajj); and the Ramadan fast.
These five pillars were supplemented by social rulings, regularizing and im-
posing a rational morality on the previous chaos of clan customs. They es-
tablished an overarching ethic of commonality and brotherhood while
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Islam and Invasions 71

reinforcing some traditions of patriarchy and clan loyalty. The institution of

the blood feud was discouraged and regulated, as was divorce. Incest was
outlawed, and honesty and fairness in business dealings were encouraged.
The importance of women in the story of Mohammad’s life—first
Khadija, then his later wives, Aisha and others, and his daughter Fatima3—is
expressed in the provisions he made for them, which in every case limited the
power of men over women while leaving male supremacy intact. The Qor’an
urged respect for women within marriage and respect for their modesty and
privacy, though it made no specific rules for women’s dress or veiling, and
some have suggested that the veil originated as an elite practice, copied from
the Christian Byzantine court—comparable perhaps with the custom among
aristocratic Englishwomen in Victorian times. The Qor’an gave women the
right to own property in their own name. It also discouraged the pre-Islamic
practice of killing unwanted girl infants (in Sura 81, speaking of the Day of
Judgment: “. . . when the infant girl, buried alive, is asked for what crime she was
slain; when the records of men’s deeds are laid open, and heaven is stripped bare; when
Hell burns fiercely and Paradise is brought near: then each soul shall know what it has
done”). Many have judged that the Qoranic ideal and Mohammad’s example
were more favorable to women than later Arab and Muslim practice.4
The decade after the Hijra was marked by continuing hostility and eventu-
ally war with the ruling families of Mecca, and by missionary effort toward the
tribes of Arabia as a whole. Gradually Mohammad and his followers made
headway, and finally in 630 the Meccans accepted Islam and Mohammad’s su-
premacy. The Ka’ba of Mecca was made the central, holy shrine of Islam. Is-
lam’s victory over the Meccans’ resistance won over most of the remaining
Arab tribes. By the time of the Prophet’s death in 632, most of Arabia was
unified under the new religion. Vigorous, idealistic, and determined to spread
its dominance more widely, Islam had created a powerful religious, political,
and military force that was to change the face of the region—and the world.

The Arab Conquest

When Mohammad died, the Muslim umma threatened to fall apart. Differ-
ent factions had different ideas about the succession, and some tribes sought
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72 A History of Iran

to regain their independence. Mohammad’s friend Abu Bakr was elected as

the Prophet’s successor, becoming the first caliph (Khalifa means successor)
and promising to follow Mohammad’s example (sunna). It was natural that
this should include further efforts to spread the message of Islam as Mo-
hammad had done—both by negotiation and by armed force, including
raiding into hostile territory. Initially this meant consolidation in the south-
ern and eastern parts of the Arabian peninsula, and then expansion north-
ward into what is now Iraq and Syria. The dynamic of expansion helped to
stabilize the rule of the first four caliphs (known by Sunni Muslims as the
Rashidun, the righteous caliphs), but their rule was nonetheless turbulent
and three of them died violently.
The crucial point at which raiding turned into more deliberate wars of
conquest was the Battle of Ajnadayn, near Gaza, in 634, where the Muslim
Arabs defeated a Byzantine army sent to restore order in Palestine. The
burst of confidence inspired by this success prompted further victories—
Damascus was taken in 636 and a Byzantine relief force was decisively
beaten at the Battle of Yarmuk in the same year, confirming the Muslims in
possession of Syria. Their enemies discovered that Islam had given the
Arabs an almost invincible cohesion and confidence in battle. This attribute
was later described by the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun as asabiyah,
roughly translating as “group feeling.” In the following year the Muslim
armies moved east against the Sassanid Empire.
Persia, like the Byzantine Empire, was weakened by the wars that had
raged through the reign of Khosraw II. The Sassanids had repulsed initial
moves by Arab raiding parties into Mesopotamia, but the royal army under
King Yazdegerd III was defeated at Qadesiyya (near Hilla in modern Iraq)
in 637, after which the Arabs took Ctesiphon and the whole of Mesopota-
mia. Arab generals persuaded the caliph to continue the offensive against
the Persians rather than allow Yazdegerd to counterattack, and they de-
feated him a second time at Nahavand, near Hamadan, in 641. After this,
Sassanid resistance effectively collapsed and Yazdegerd fled east, begging
local rulers to help him against the Arabs (he was killed at Merv in 651—
not by the invaders but by one of his own subjects, like Darius III). The
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Expansion of Islam 632-644

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74 A History of Iran

Arabs increasingly established their dominion over the Iranian plateau,

though towns like Qom and Kashan fought hard before surrendering, and
resistance in the Caspian provinces of Tabarestan continued for many years.5
Khorasan was conquered by 654, and despite resistance in the outlying terri-
tories along the southern coast of the Caspian and in the northeast, these
were all taken and Balkh captured by 707.
The conquest was not, for the most part, followed by mass murder, forced
conversion, or what today we would call ethnic cleansing. Instead the new
Arab masters were content, as a matter of policy, simply to replace the ruling
elites of the territories they had conquered. The Arab troops set up armed
camps in the new lands, on the fringe of existing cities or in the form of new
settlements, often on the margin between cultivated land and uncultivated
territory that could be used to graze animals. The Arabs generally allowed
existing proprietors, peasants, and merchants to go about their business as
normal, expropriating only state land, the estates of the Zoroastrian tem-
ples, and those of members of the old elites who had fled or had died in the
fighting.
Religious policy was marked by the same tolerance and restraint once the
conquest was over. Mohammad had specified tolerance for Christians and
Jews (“people of the Book”) on condition that they paid tribute, which be-
came a special tax for non-Muslims (the jizya). But this left Iranian Zoroas-
trians in a gray area, and many fire temples were destroyed and priests killed
before it became normal for Zoroastrians to be treated with similar toler-
ance, subject to the jizya.6 The example of the new rulers, and the settlement
of Arab soldiers into the new territories, began a slow process of Islamiza-
tion, made easier by the similarity of many of the precepts of Islam to the fa-
miliar features of Mazdaism—righteous thought and action, judgment,
heaven and hell, and so on. There was a religious ferment through this
period, within which many concepts and formulae might be held in com-
mon across different sects. Consider the following:

. . . at whatever moment he dies eighty maiden angels will come to meet him
with flowers . . . and a golden bedstead, and they will speak to him thus: do not
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Islam and Invasions 75

fear etc. . . . And his fruitful work, in the form of a wondrous divine princess, a
virgin, will come before him, immortal . . . and she herself will guide him to
heaven.7

This remarkable passage links the idea of the houris of paradise, familiar
from the Qoranic context, with the Mazdaean idea of the daena leading the
soul to heaven. But this text is a Manichaean one, in the Iranian Sogdian
language, from Central Asia. Bausani has given a series of significant paral-
lels between passages in the Zoroastrian scriptures and passages in the
Qor’an.8 Despite the firm, clear, guiding principle of the Mohammadan rev-
elation, other earlier ideas continued to bubble, sometimes to appear again
later in some of the more diverse and eclectic Islamic sects.
The propertied and elite classes of Iran had an interest in converting to
Islam, in order to avoid the jizya. They and more modest folk converted and
often attached themselves to Arab clans or families as mawali (clients),
sometimes taking Arabic names. But most inhabitants of Iran remained
non-Muslim for several centuries. The restraint of the conquerors is proba-
bly another important explanation for the success of the conquest—many of
the subjects of the new empire may have been less heavily taxed than previ-
ously, and ordinary Iranians probably benefited from the replacement of a
strongly hierarchical aristocratic and priestly system by the more egalitarian
Islamic arrangements, with their emphasis on the duty of ordinary Muslims
to the poor. But as in other epochs, the victors wrote the history; if more
contemporary material from the peoples of the conquered lands had sur-
vived, the picture of tolerance might be more shaded. There were massacres
at Ray and Istakhr, both Mazdaean religious centers that resisted more
stubbornly than elsewhere.9

Umayyads and Abbasids

Within twenty years of Mohammad’s death, his Arab successors had con-
quered most of the territory we now call the Middle East. After one hun-
dred years, they controlled an area that extended from the Atlantic to the
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76 A History of Iran

Indian Ocean. From this point on, Iran zamin (the land of Iran) was ruled for
the most part by foreign monarchs for nearly a millennium. But conquest
and the problems of wealth and power it brought also created new tensions
among the victorious Arabs.
The fourth caliph, Ali, was Mohammad’s cousin, and had married his
daughter Fatima. But despite these close ties to the Prophet and his own pi-
ous reputation, Ali’s caliphate was marred by civil war with the followers of
the previous caliph, Uthman. When Ali was assassinated, a close relative of
Uthman, Mu’awiya, declared himself caliph. This was in 661, a date that
marks the beginning of the Umayyad dynasty, named after the family from
which the dynasty was descended—one of the leading families of Mecca
that Mohammad had fought before Mecca’s submission to Islam.
Soon the new empire adopted forms of government resembling those of
its predecessors, the Romans and the Sassanid Persians. The capital moved
to Damascus (at that time, of course, a city formed by centuries of Chris-
tian, Roman, and Byzantine rule) and henceforth the caliphate passed
mainly from father to son. The Umayyads discriminated strongly in favor of
Arabs in the running of the empire, but were criticized among the Arabs for
becoming too worldly and making too many compromises. They distanced
themselves from their origins, became lax personally in their religious obser-
vances, and depended on paid soldiers rather than kinsmen and clan follow-
ers. As the empire and their responsibilities expanded, these changes were
probably inevitable, as was the response—part of the eternal tension in Is-
lam between piety and political authority.
Throughout this period there was dissent over the right of the Umayyads
to rule. One group, the Kharijites, said that the caliph should be chosen by
popular assent from among righteous Muslims, and deposed if he acted
wrongly. Another group was to prove more important in the long run, and
their dissent from orthodox Sunni Islam (named after the sunna—the ex-
ample of the Prophet) eventually created a permanent schism. These Mus-
lims identified with Ali, and the family of the Prophet descended through
him. They believed that Ali should have been the first caliph, and that the
caliphate should have descended in his line, which (through Ali’s wife Fa-
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Islam and Invasions 77

tima) was also the line of the Prophet himself. Ali’s second son Hosein at-
tempted a revolt in 680 but was overwhelmed at Karbala by Umayyad
troops and killed. This was a crucial event, the full significance of which will
be explored in a later chapter. Eventually the attachment to the family of the
Prophet—to Ali and his descendants—evolved a theology of its own and a
firm belief that the descendants of Ali were the only legitimate authority in
Islam, becoming what we now call Shi‘ism.
Tension and dissent reached a crescendo in the middle years of the
eighth century. In the 740s there was a revolt against the Umayyads in
Kufa, and they suffered external defeats by the Turks in Transoxiana and
by the Byzantines in Anatolia. Then in the late 740s a Persian convert,
Abu Muslim, began a revolt against Umayyad rule in Khorasan, where
the creative dynamic between survivors of the old Persian land owning
gentry (the dehqans) and the new Arab settlers had been particularly pow-
erful, and where much intermarrying and conversion had occurred. There
appears to have been a real fusion of cultures, with Arab settlers adopting
the Persian language, Persian dress, and even some pre-Islamic Persian
festivals.
Abu Muslim led his revolt in the name of the Prophet’s family, thereby
concealing the movement’s final purpose and ensuring a wide appeal. Draw-
ing support from Arab settlers in Khorasan, who resented their taxes and
felt betrayed by the Umayyads, Abu Muslim and his followers defeated local
opposition and, starting from Merv, led their armies westward under a black
banner. They defeated the forces sent against them by the Umayyad caliph
in a series of battles in 749–750, and in the latter year proclaimed a new
caliph in Kufa—Abu’l Abbas (for whom the Abbasid dynasty was named).
Abbas was a descendant not of Ali but of another of Mohammad’s cousins.
Before long the new caliph, uneasy at the continuing strength of Abu Mus-
lim’s support in Khorasan, had him executed (in 755),10 the effect of which
was to endorse orthodox Sunnism and to marginalize once again the follow-
ers of Ali, the Kharijites and other disparate groups that had supported the
revolt originally. But the revolt of Abu Muslim was another important reli-
gious revolution in Iran. He was remembered long afterward by Iranians,
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78 A History of Iran

and still later by Iranian Shi‘ites, as a righteous, brave, and successful revolu-
tionary betrayed by those he put in power.
Instead of Damascus, the new capital of the Abbasid dynasty was estab-
lished in Baghdad, hard by the old Sassanid capital of Ctesiphon (though
the seat of Abbasid government later moved north to Samarra). The center
of gravity of the empire had moved east in a deeper sense, too. As time went
on, Persian influence at the court of the new dynasty became more and more
marked (especially through the Persian Barmakid family of officials), and
some historians have represented the Abbasid supremacy as a cultural re-
conquest of the Arab conquerors by the Persians. The strengthening of Per-
sian influence had begun already under the Umayyads. But now texts
recording Sassanid court practice were translated into Arabic and applied by
the new bureaucrats. This created a more hierarchical pattern of govern-
ment. The caliph was screened by officials from contact with petitioners, a
departure from earlier Umayyad practice in which the caliph had still taken
counsel from tribal leaders in assembly and manipulated their loyalties and
allegiances in age-old patriarchal fashion. Now new offices appeared in the
government of the Abbasids, including that of vizier, or chief adviser or min-
ister, and the administration was divided into separate departments or min-
istries called diwans. These institutions were taken directly from Sassanid
court practice, and were to endure in Islamic rulership for more than a thou-
sand years.
The influence was also apparent in the buildings constructed by the Ab-
basids, and Persian architects built many of the buildings of Baghdad. Even
the circular ground plan of the new city may have been copied from the Sas-
sanian royal city of Ferozabad in Fars. Where the Umayyads had tended to
follow Byzantine architectural models, Abbasid styles were based on Sas-
sanid ones. This is apparent in the open spaces enclosed by arcaded walls, in
the use of stucco decoration, in the way domes were constructed above
straight-walled buildings below, and, above all, in the classic motif of Sas-
sanian architecture, the iwans. These were large open arches, often in the
middle of one side of a court, often with arcades stretching away on each
side, often used as audience halls. As with other cultural inheritances from
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Islam and Invasions 79

Sassanid Iran, these architectural motifs survived for centuries in the Islamic
world.11
Particularly under the Abbasid caliph Al-Mansur many Persian adminis-
trators and scholars came to the court, mainly from Khorasan and Transoxi-
ana (though they still worked there in Arabic, and many had Arabic names).
These Persians encountered opposition from some Arabs, who called them
Ajam, which means the mute ones, or the mumblers—a disparaging refer-
ence to their poor Arabic. The Persians defended themselves and their cul-
tural identity from Arab chauvinism through the so-called shu’ubiyya
movement, the title of which refers to a verse from the forty-ninth Sura of
the Qor’an, in which Allah demands mutual respect between different peo-
ples (shu’ub). It was primarily a movement among Persian scribes and offi-
cials; their opponents (including some Persians) tended to be the scholars
and philologians. But the shu’ubiyya sometimes went beyond asserting
equality or parity in favor of the superiority of Persian culture, especially lit-
erature. Given the religious history of Persia and the lingering attachment of
many Persians to Mazdaean or sub-Mazdaean beliefs, shu’ubiyya also im-
plied a challenge to Islam, or at least to the form of Islam practiced by the
Arabs. A satirical contemporary recorded the attitude of a typical young
scribe, steeped in the texts that recorded the history and the procedures of
the Sassanid monarchy:

. . . His first task is to attack the composition of the Qor’an and denounce its in-
consistencies. . . . If anyone in his presence acknowledges the pre-eminence of the
Companions of the Prophet he pulls a grimace, and turns his back when their
merits are extolled. . . . And then he straight away interrupts the conversation to
speak of the policies of Ardashir Papagan, the administration of Anushirvan, and
the admirable way the country was run under the Sasanians . . . 12

In time, the solution to such conflicts proved to be assimilation and synthe-

sis, but the shu’ubiyya gave the Persians in Baghdad a collective self-confidence
and helped to ensure the survival of a strong element of pre-Islamic Persian
culture as part of that synthesis.13 Like the religious controversies about free
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80 A History of Iran

will and the nature of the Qor’an that were going on at the same time, the
shu’ubiyya was a sign of conflict, change, and creative energy.
Boosted by the creativity of the Persians the Abbasid regime set a stan-
dard and was looked back on later as a golden age. Baghdad grew to be the
largest city in the world outside China—by the ninth century it had a popu-
lation of around four hundred thousand. The Abbasids endeavored to evade
the tensions between piety and government and to cement their support
among all Muslims by abandoning the Umayyad principle of Arab su-
premacy and by establishing the principle of equality between all Muslims.
This same inclusive spirit extended even to taking Christians, Jews, and de-
scendants of Ali into the government—provided they proved loyal to the
regime.
The integration of the huge area of the Arab conquests under the peace-
ful and orderly rule of the Abbasid caliphate brought new and dynamic pat-
terns of trade, as well as a great release of economic energy. The caliphs
encouraged improvements in agriculture, particularly through irrigation,
which created new prosperity especially in Mesopotamia, as well as on the
Iranian plateau. There the following centuries saw the widespread introduc-
tion of rice cultivation, groves of citrus fruits, and other novelties.14 The re-
gion of Khorasan and Transoxiana profited hugely from revitalized trade
along the ancient Silk Route to China, from the agricultural improvements,
and from the mixing of old and new, Arab and Iranian. Because of these
changes, the area entered an economic and intellectual golden age of its own.
The Abbasid system relied first on the local networks of control set up by
provincial governors across the vast territories of the empire, and second on
the bureaucracy that tied those governors to the center in Baghdad. The
governors collected tax locally, deducted for their expenses (including mili-
tary outlays), and remitted the remainder to the Abbasid court. The hand of
central government was relatively light, but these arrangements put consid-
erable power in the hands of the governors, which in the long run was to
erode the authority of the caliphate.
The Abbasid court became rich, but it also became very learned. The
caliphs, especially caliph al-Ma’mun (813–833, himself the son of a Persian
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Islam and Invasions 81

concubine), encouraged and supported scholars who translated ancient texts

into Arabic. These were initially translated from Persian, but later also from
Syriac and Greek, drawing on writings discovered across the conquered ter-
ritories. Al-Ma’mun’s predecessor al-Mansur (754–775) had founded a new
library, the Beyt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), which attempted to assimi-
late all knowledge in one place and translate it into Arabic. An idea taken di-
rectly from the model of the Sassanid royal libraries, the House of Wisdom
drew extensively on writings and scholars from Gondeshapur in Khuzestan,
the most famous of the Sassanid academies.15 Gondeshapur had survived up
to that point, but it seems thereafter to have been eclipsed by Baghdad. At
the same time, the diffusion of scholarship also profited from the introduc-
tion of paper manufacturing from China, which replaced the more expen-
sive and awkward papyrus and parchment.
Al-Ma’mun seems to have encouraged a shift in emphasis toward astrol-
ogy, mathematics, and the translation of Greek texts, under the eye of his
chief translator, Hunayn ibn Ishaq. These developments led to what has
been called the ninth-century renaissance, as Persian scholars writing in
Arabic discovered and applied the lessons especially of Greek philosophy,
mathematics, science, medicine, history, and literature. The new scholarship
was not merely passive, but creative. It produced new scientific writings, lit-
erature, histories, and poetry of great and lasting quality, forming the basis
of much later intellectual endeavor—including in Europe—in the centuries
that followed.
Through the translations, Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies were es-
pecially influential, thanks to prestigious philosophers al-Kindi and al-
Farabi. The great historian al-Tabari (838–923) also worked in Baghdad at
this time. Medicine made significant advances through properly scientific re-
searches into anatomy, epidemiology, and other disciplines, building on and
eventually far surpassing the work of the classical Greek physician Galen.
Many of these achievements were later collated and made known in the
West through the writings of another Persian, the great Avicenna (born Ibn
Sina, 980–1037). Avicenna’s writings were important in both East and West
for his presentation of Aristotelian philosophical method and especially
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82 A History of Iran

logic. Disputations along Aristotelian lines became central to teaching at the

higher level in eastern madresehs from the time of Avicenna onward.
It was a period of great intellectual energy, excitement, and discovery,
and as the Abbasid court became a model for succeeding generations in
government and in other ways, so too it became a model in the intellectual
and cultural sphere. The translations into Arabic done by Persians in Bagh-
dad in the eleventh century were later put into Latin for Western readers by
translators like Gerard of Cremona, working in Toledo in Spain in the
twelfth century. Access to these writings gave a new vitality to Western
scholarship. Avicenna and Averroes—the latter an Arab and an Aris-
totelian like Avicenna—became familiar names in the new universities of
Europe, and after the time of Thomas Aquinas the philosophy of Aristotle,
following their model, dominated European learning for two hundred years
or more.
But at the same time there developed a separate tradition of Islamic schol-
arship across the towns and cities of the empire. This learning, independent
of the authority of the caliph, was based instead on the authority of the
Qor’an and the hadith (the huge body of traditions of the Prophet’s life and
sayings, and related material, collated with varying degrees of reliability in the
centuries after his death). The ulema—scholars practiced in the study and in-
terpretation of those religious texts—tended to be hostile to the sophistica-
tion and magnificence of the court. This was particularly the case in the time
of al-Ma’mun and his immediate successors, when the caliph and the court
inclined toward the religious thinking of the group called the Mu’tazilis, who
favored ideas of free will, a doctrine of the created nature of the Qor’an, and
(partly under the influence of Greek philosophy) the legitimacy of interpre-
tation of religious texts based on reason.
In contrast, many of the ulema outside court circles tended to favor more
deterministic positions and a strict traditionalism that insisted on the suffi-
ciency of the texts on their own. They also disapproved of extra-Islamic in-
fluences. The parallel cultures of the Abbasid court and the ulema expressed
the continuing tension between political authority and religion under Islam.
In the end, the traditionalist tendency was the one that prevailed—with
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Islam and Invasions 83

variations and some compromises—in the four schools or mazhabs of Sun-

nism: the Hanbali, Shafi’i, Maliki, and Hanafi.
But aspects of Mu’tazili thinking endured more strongly in the separate
Shi‘a tradition. The great Arab historian and social theorist Ibn Khaldun
recognized in the fourteenth century that most of the hadith scholars and
theologians were Persians working in Arabic (two of the four Sunni
mazhabs were founded by Persians). So too were the philologists who estab-
lished the grammar of the Arabic language and recorded it formally.16 In the
Iranian lands, the usages of the ulema were a major conduit for bringing
Arabic words into Persian, and to this day the Persian of the mullahs tends
to be the most Arabized.
On a more popular level, religious sects and groups proliferated in the
towns and villages of Iran including sects that were regarded as heretical by
both Muslims and Zoroastrians. These groups, often encompassing sub-
Mazdakite ideas, were labelled Khorramites,17 a term that may derive from a
word meaning ribald or joyous. Some such groups were involved in the ini-
tial revolt of Abu Muslim, but also in other revolts, including those of Son-
bad the Magian (756), Ustad-sis (767–768), al-Muqanna (780)—all mainly
centered on Khorasan—and again in the revolt of Papak in what is now
Kurdistan and Azerbaijan in 817–838. Several of these revolts showed mil-
lenarian and other features (including an anti-Muslim celebration of wine
and women), drawing in part on Mazdaism—features that were to resurface
later in Shi‘ism, and Sufism. On women, for example, a contemporary said
that some of the Khorramites:

. . . believe in communal access to women, provided that the women agree, and
in free access to everything in which the self takes pleasure and to which na-
ture inclines, as long as no-one is harmed thereby

And another:

They say that a woman is like a flower, no matter who smells it, nothing is de-
tracted from it. 18
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84 A History of Iran

As early as the caliphate of Harun al-Rashid (786–809), the processes of

dislocation and separation that were to split the united empire of the Ab-
basids became manifest. Provincial governors, valued for their local authority
and retained in place for that reason, began to pass on their governorships to
their sons, creating local dynasties. The latter acquired courts of their own,
new poles of culture, and authority. As they did so their expenses became
greater, and less tax revenue was sent to the center. They quickly became ef-
fectively independent, though most of them still deferred to the caliphate as
the continuing central authority in Islam.
It is in the nature of the history of empires that their story gets told in terms
of their decline and fall. Historians are always looking for explanations, causes,
and the origins of things. When it comes to empires, this tends to mean that
their end casts a long shadow backward in time. This could make the system
and institutions of the Abbasid empire, for example, look flawed and faulty al-
most from the very beginning. That would be misleading. The Abbasid period
was a time of enormous human achievement, in political terms as well as in
terms of civilization, art, architecture, science, and literature. The release of new
ideas and the exchange of old ones within a huge area, held together by a gener-
ally benign and tolerant government, brought about a dynamic and hugely in-
fluential civilization, way ahead of what was going on in Europe at the time.
The first of the regional dynasties to establish itself as a real rival to cen-
tral authority was that of the Taherids of Khorasan (821–873), followed by
the Saffarids of Sistan (861–1003) and the Samanids of Bokhara
(875–999)—all dynasties of Iranian origin. The Samanids were based on
Bokhara and the region around Balkh, claiming descent from the Sassanid
prince Bahram Chubin. Each of these dynasties (especially the Samanids)
and those that followed (notably the Ghaznavids and Buyids) tended to set
up courts adorned with Persian bureaucrats, scholars, astrologers, and poets.
Imitating in this way the great caliphal court of Baghdad, these provincial
courts enhanced their own dynasties’ prestige and also disguised their tenure
of power, which otherwise might have appeared as more nakedly dependent
on brute military force. The patronage of these courts, working on the intel-
lectual and religious ferment of the eastern Iranian lands at a time when the
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Islam and Invasions 85

potential of the new form of the Persian language was ready to be explored,
produced the beginnings of a great outpouring of wonderful poetic litera-
ture, including some of the most sublime poetry ever created. The poetry is
so unfamiliar to most Western readers, so fresh and surprising in its content,
and so important in its effect on later Iranian and Persianate culture across
the region that it warrants more detailed attention.

Drunk with Love: The Poets and the Sufis,

the Turks and the Mongols
From the very beginning, the grand theme of Persian poetry is love. But it is
a whole teeming continent of love—sexual love, divine love, homoerotic
love, unrequited love, hopeless love, and hopeful love. It is love aspiring to
oblivion, love aspiring to union, and love as solace and resignation. Often it
may be two or more of these at the same time, intermingled and ambigu-
ously hinted at through metaphor. Other times love may not even be men-
tioned, but will be present nonetheless through other metaphors—notably
through another great poetic theme, wine.
It is possible that the Persian poetry of this period inherited ideas and
patterns from a lost tradition of Sassanid court poetry—love poetry and
heroic poetry—just as Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh emerged from a known tradi-
tion of stories about the kings of Persia. But most of the verse forms, along
with the immediate precedents of themes of love, derive from previous Ara-
bic poetic traditions and reflect the exchange of linguistic and other cultural
materials between Iranians and Arabs in the years after the conquest. While
there are fragments of poetry known from earlier times, the first more sub-
stantial verses from known poets come from the period of the Taherids. But
the first great figure was a poet at the Samanid court—Rudaki:

Del sir nagardadat ze bidadgari

Cheshm ab nagardadat cho dar man nagari
In torfe ke dusttar ze janat daram
Ba anke ze sad hezar doshman batari
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86 A History of Iran

Your heart never has its fill of cruelty

Your eyes do not soften with tears when you look at me
It is strange that I love you more than my own soul,
Because you are worse than a hundred thousand enemies.19

Rudaki (who died around 940), along with other poets like Shahid Balkhi
and Daqiqi Tusi, benefited from the deliberate Persianizing policy of the
Samanid court. The Samanids gave the poets their patronage and generally
encouraged the use of Persian rather than Arabic. Abolqasem Ferdowsi (c.
935–c. 1020) was less fortunate. He was born in the period of Samanid rule,
but later, when the Samanid regime crumbled, he came under the rule of the
Ghaznavids, a dynasty of Turkic origin. His Shahnameh (which continued
and completed a project begun for the Samanids by Daqiqi) can be seen as
the logical fulfillment of Samanid cultural policy—avoiding Arabic words,
eulogizing the pre-Islamic Persian kings, and going beyond a non-Islamic po-
sition to an explicitly pro-Mazdaean one. Some of the concluding lines of
the Shahnameh, speaking as if from just before the defeat at Qadesiyya and
the coming of Islam, echo the earliest Mazdaean inscriptions of Darius at
Bisitun. This is shocking in an eleventh-century Islamic context (the minbar,
mentioned in the first line, is the raised platform, rather like a church pulpit,
from which prayers are led in the mosque):

They’ll set the minbar level with the throne,

And name their children Omar and Osman.
Then will our heavy labours come to ruin.
O, from this height a long descent begins. . .
...
Then men will break their compact with the Truth
And crookedness and Lies will be held dear.20

It’s no surprise then that Ferdowsi’s great work, when finished, got a less-
than-enthusiastic welcome from the ruling Ghaznavid prince, whose views
were more orthodox. Many of the stories passed down through the centuries
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Islam and Invasions 87

about the lives of the poets are unreliable, but some of them may at least re-
flect some aspects of real events. One story about the Shahnameh says that
the Ghaznavid sultan, having expected a shorter work of different character,
sent only a small reward to Ferdowsi in return. The poet, disgusted, split the
money between his local wine seller and a bath attendant. The sultan even-
tually read a particularly brilliant passage from the Shahnameh, realized its
greatness, and sent Ferdowsi a generous gift, but too late—as the pack ani-
mals bearing Ferdowsi’s treasure entered his town through one gate, his
body was carried out for burial through another.
The great themes of the Shahnameh are the exploits of proud heroes on
horseback with lance and bow, their conflicts of loyalty between their con-
sciences and their kings, their affairs with feisty women who are as slim as
cypresses and radiant as the moon, and royal courts full of fighting and
feasting—razm o bazm. It is not difficult to read into this the nostalgia of a
class of bureaucrats and scholars descended from the small gentry landown-
ers (the dehqans) who had provided the proud cavalry of the Sassanid
armies. Reduced now from the sword to the pen, they watch Arabs and
Turks play the great games of war and politics.

Tahamtan chinin pasokh avord baz

Ke hastam ze Kavus Key bi niaz
Mara takht zin bashad o taj targ
Qaba joshan o del nahade bemarg

The brave Rostam replied to them in turn,

“I have no need of Kay Kavus.
This saddle is my throne, this helm my crown.
My robe is chain mail; my heart’s prepared for death”21

The Shahnameh has had a significance in Persian culture comparable to

that of Shakespeare in English or the Lutheran Bible in German, only per-
haps more so—it has been a central text in education and in many homes,
second only to the Qor’an and the great fourteenth-century poet Hafez. It
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88 A History of Iran

has helped to fix and unify the language, to supply models of morality and
conduct, and to uphold a sense of Iranian identity—reaching back beyond
the Islamic conquest—that might otherwise have faded with the Sassanids.
The poetry of the Shahnameh, and its themes of heroism on horseback,
love, loyalty, and betrayal, has much in common with the romances of me-
dieval Europe, and it is thought-provoking that it first attained fame a few de-
cades before the First Crusade brought an increased level of contact between
western Europe and the lands at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. There
is also a theory that the troubadour tradition, and thus the immensely fruit-
ful medieval European trope of courtly love, originated at least in part with
the Sufis of Arab Spain.22 But it may just be a case of parallel development.
The Ghaznavids did not reverse the Samanid pattern of patronage and
continued to encourage poets writing in Persian. But the later poets were
less strict about linguistic purity and more content to use commonplace
Arabic loan words. Further west the Buyid dynasty, originating among Shi‘a
Muslims in Tabarestan, had expanded to absorb Mesopotamia and take
Baghdad (in 945), ending the independent rule of the Abbasid caliphs and
ruling from then on in their name. But the great literary revival continued to
be centered in the east.
Naser-e Khosraw, born near Balkh in 1003, is believed to have written
perhaps thirty thousand lines of verse in his lifetime, of which about eleven
thousand have survived. He was brought up as a Shi‘a, made the pilgrimage
to Mecca in 1050, and later became an Ismaili before returning to Badakh-
shan to write. Most of his poetry is philosophical and religious:

Know yourself; for if you know yourself

You will also know the difference between good and evil.
First become intimate with your own inner being,
Then commander of the whole company.
When you know yourself, you know everything;
When you know that, you have escaped from all evil

Be wakeful for once: how long have you been sleeping?

Look at yourself: you are something wonderful enough.23
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90 A History of Iran

For many years the Abbasid caliphs and the other dynasties had em-
ployed Turkish mercenaries, taken as slaves from Central Asia, to fight their
wars and police their territories. Turks had in turn become important in the
politics of the empire, and on occasion had threatened to take control—the
Ghaznavids had succeeded in doing so in the eastern part of the empire. But
in the middle of the eleventh century a confederation of Turkic tribes under
the leadership of the Seljuk Turks went farther. Defeating the Ghaznavids
in the northeast, they broke into the heartlands of the empire and took
Baghdad before fighting their way farther west. In 1071 they defeated the
Byzantines and occupied most of the interior of Asia Minor.
Centuries of contact with the Abbasid regime and its successors had Is-
lamized the Turks and had made them relatively assimilable. The second
Seljuk sultan, Alp Arslan, had as his chief vizier a Persian, Hasan Tusi
Nizam ol-Mulk (1018–1092), and before long the dynasty was ruling ac-
cording to the Persianate Abbasid model like the others before it. Nizam ol-
Mulk wrote a book of guidance for Alp Arslan’s successor. Called the
Siyasat-Nameh, which translates as The Book of Government, it (along with
the slightly earlier Qabus-name) was for centuries the model for the Mirror-
of-Princes genre of literature, providing manuals of guidance for rulers. It
also influenced European versions of the same kind of thing, down to the
time of Machiavelli and his Principe.
Nizam ol-Mulk was a friend of Omar Khayyam (c. 1048–c. 1124/1129)
and there are some famous stories of dubious veracity about the friendship.24
But it is probably true that when Nizam ol-Mulk became vizier he gave
some financial help to Omar Khayyam, and possibly some protection, too.
Among Iranians it is commonplace to say that Omar Khayyam was a more
distinguished mathematician and astronomer than a poet. To assess the va-
lidity of this is like trying to compare apples with billiard balls. He did work
on Euclidean geometry, cubic equations, binomial expansion, and quadratic
equations that experts in mathematics regard as influential and important.
He developed a new calendar for the Seljuk sultan, based on highly accurate
observations of the sun, that was at least as accurate as the Gregorian calen-
dar ordained in sixteenth-century Europe by the Catholic church.25 And it
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Islam and Invasions 91

seems he was probably the first to demonstrate the theory that the nightly
progression of the constellations through the sky was due to the earth spin-
ning around its axis, rather than the movement of the skies around a fixed
earth as had previously been assumed.
Omar Khayyam’s dry skepticism in his poetry makes his voice unique
among the other Persian poets, but also reflects a self-confidence drawn per-
haps from his preeminent position in his other studies—his knowledge that
in them he had surpassed what was known before. His name is famous in
the West through the translations of Edward Fitzgerald, which were taken
by readers to represent a spirit of eat, drink, and be merry hedonism. This is
not quite right. Fitzgerald’s are free translations, and his nineteenth-century
idiom (fine though his verses are), with its dashes and exclamation marks,
ohs and ahs, to a degree misrepresents the sober force of the originals. Here,
for example, is Fitzgerald:

“How sweet is mortal Sovranty!”—think some:

Others—“How blest the Paradise to come!”
Ah, take the cash in hand and waive the Rest;
Oh, the brave Music of a distant Drum!

Here is the original:

Guyand kasan behesht ba hur khosh ast

Man miguyam ke ab-e angur khosh ast
In naqd begir o dast az an nesye bedar
K’avaz-e dohol shenidan az dur khosh ast

And here a more literal translation:

It is said that paradise, with its houris, is well.

I say, the juice of the grape is well.
Take this cash and let go that credit
Because hearing the sound of the drums, from afar, is well.26
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92 A History of Iran

Translating poetry is notoriously difficult, and some would say that it is a

vain endeavor entirely. For example, the word khosh has a wide range of related
meanings and is found in a series of compound words in Persian so that, with
those, it takes up several pages in any dictionary. It means delicious, delightful,
sweet, happy, cheerful, pleasant, good, and prosperous. One can see different
shades of these meanings in each of the three lines in which it appears in this
poem. The form of the poem is the quatrain, or ruba’i—the plural is rubaiyat.
Other Persian verse forms include the ghazal, the masnavi, and the qasida.
Most of Omar Khayyam’s surviving poetry is in the ruba’i form, but there
has been much doubt as to which of the thousand or more rubaiyat attributed
to him were actually his work. It seems likely that the poems of others—poems
that were of a skeptical or irreligious tendency and might therefore have at-
tracted disapproval—were attributed to him in order to have the grace ac-
corded his great name. At the same time, it may be that he set down doubts in
his poems that were only part of his thinking about the deity. But one can read
in his poems a rugged humanism in the face of the harsh realities of life, and
an impatience with easy, consoling answers, that anticipates existentialism: a
recognition of the complexity of existence, the intractability of its problems,
and a principled acceptance. His philosophical writing largely revolved around
questions of free will, determinism, existence, and essence.27

Niki o badi ke dar nahad-e bashar ast,

Shadi o ghami ke dar qaza o qadar ast
Ba charkh makon havale k’andar rah-e aql
Charkh az tu hezar bar bicharetar ast

Good and evil, which are in the nature of mankind,

Joy and sadness, which are in chance and fate
Do not attribute them to the machinery of the heavens, because in reason
That machine is a thousand times more helpless than you28

There are dozens of quatrains that one could bring forward to illustrate
the subtlety and intellectual power of this great man, but this cannot be a
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Islam and Invasions 93

book about just Omar Khayyam. The following poem belongs to a collection
from an early manuscript attributed to Omar Khayyam by the British
scholar Arberry, which since Arberry’s time has been considered doubtful.
But it is known from other manuscripts, too, and many scholars still include
this poem with Omar Khayyam’s best. If it is not by him, it nonetheless pre-
sents a defiant personal manifesto close to the spirit he expressed elsewhere:

Gar man ze mey-e moghaneh mastam, hastam

Var asheq o rend o botparastam, hastam
Har kas be khiyal-e khod gamane darad
Man khod danam, har anche hastam, hastam.

If I am drunk on forbidden wine, I am.

And if a worshipper of love, and roguery, and false gods, then I am.
Everyone has their own doubts.
I know myself; whatever I am, I am.29

The eleventh century saw the first great upsurge in the unique mystical
movement that is Sufism,30 and in this poem, as elsewhere, Omar Khayyam
uses terms that were commonplace in Sufi poetry and were used as key con-
cepts, often metaphorically. Mey-e moghaneh, for example, means Magian
wine—forbidden wine bought from the Zoroastrians. Rend means a wild
young man, a rogue or rake. Kharabat is the house of ruin, the tavern; and the
saqi is the young boy who serves the wine and is the object of homoerotic
longing. But although some commentators have claimed Omar Khayyam as
a Sufi, and notwithstanding he may have had some sympathy for the Sufis,
his voice is too much his own, too unique to be set in any religious category.
And his skepticism is too strong.
Sufism is a huge and complex phenomenon, with very different aspects at
different times and in different places, from eleventh-century Asia Minor to
North Africa to modern Pakistan and beyond. Its origins are unclear, but Is-
lam sustained a mystical element from the very beginning—as is shown,
some would say, by the revelation of the Qor’an to Mohammad himself, in
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94 A History of Iran

the wilderness outside Mecca. The essence of Sufism was a seeking after
precisely this kind of personal spiritual encounter, and an abandonment of
self and all kinds of worldly egotism in the presence of the divine.
But in practices and imagery it also partook of the religious turbulence of
the centuries after the Islamic conquest, reflecting popular pre-Islamic ideas
and influences, including the mystically inclined movements of Neoplaton-
ism and gnosticism. These influences, along with a deliberate anarchic and
antinomian tendency, set it up from the start in tension with the text-based,
scholarly, urban tradition of the ulema and the urban preachers who
solemnly read and re-read the Qor’an and hadith to assert anew the correct
definition of shari‘a (Islamic law). There was tension and conflict, and a
number of Sufis or mystically inclined thinkers—like al-Hallaj and
Sohravardi, for example—were condemned as heretics by the ulema, and
were executed (in 922 and 1191, respectively). It may be that the renewed
rise of Sufism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had something to do
with a reaction to the increasing concentration of Islamic practice and Is-
lamic study in the madresehs, directly under the eye of the ulema, that was
taking place at this time.
The significance of Sufism within the Islamic lands in this period has
sometimes been neglected, but in reality it was all-pervasive. In Persia its
cultural influence is indicated by its effect on Persian poetry, but everywhere
in the land there were Sufi khanaqas—lodging houses for wandering Sufis
that also served local people for religious gatherings. In the larger towns
there might be khanaqas for different Sufi orders, as well as bazaar guilds
and other associations that often had Sufi connections. Even small villages
might have khanaqas. There are parallels here with the friaries set up for the
mendicant orders in Europe in the Middle Ages. Like the friars, the Sufis
were intimately involved in the religious lives of ordinary people and were
responsible for missionary activity in the countryside and beyond Persia.
Given the low level of literacy at the time, and the fact that the population
lived overwhelmingly in the countryside, it becomes plain that the Sufis were
central to the diffusion of Islam outside the towns and cities. The center of
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Islam and Invasions 95

their activity was in Persia, and especially in Khorasan, but they probably
were the prime means by which Persianate culture spread and consolidated
its popular influence from the Bosphorus to Delhi and beyond.31
Many Sufis, in particular many of the Sufi poets, openly scorned what
they saw as the self-important egotism of the ulema. The Sufis provoked
and attacked them for their obsession with rules and their vain pride in ob-
serving them, which forgot the selflessness necessary for true spirituality. It
is not difficult to see why some orthodox Muslims (especially Wahhabis and
their sympathizers since the eighteenth century) have anathematized and
persecuted Sufism. But in the period we are dealing with here, the mission-
ary activity of traveling Sufis (known also as dervishes) was important,
probably crucial, in the conversion of new Muslims. This was true in the re-
moter rural parts like Tabarestan, where orthodox Islam had been slow to
penetrate, but especially in newly conquered territories like Anatolia, and
among the Turks in their Central Asian homelands in the far northeast.
The first great theorist of Sufism was al-Ghazali (1058–1111), a native of
Tus in Khorasan (though there were major Sufi figures much earlier, Junayd,
for example, who died around 910). The relationship between orthodox
Sunnism and Sufism was not one of simple opposition, and al-Ghazali was
primarily an orthodox Sunni of the Shafi’i mazhhab, who wrote works attack-
ing the Mu’tazilis, Avicenna, and the introduction of ideas from Greek philos-
ophy. But he also wrote an influential Sufi work called Kimiya-ye sa’adat—The
Alchemy of Happiness. In general he tried to remove the obstacles between
orthodoxy and Sufism, presenting the latter as a legitimate aspect of the for-
mer. In the early centuries of Sufism, Shi‘a Muslims tended to be more hos-
tile to the Sufi dervishes than the Sunnis.32
Sana’i was the first great poet with a clear Sufi allegiance, and some have
compared his literary style with that of al-Ghazali. Sana’i’s long poem
Hadiqat al-haqiqa (The Garden of Truth, completed in 1131) is a classic of Sufi
poetry, but he wrote a large body of poems beyond that, and in them it is
easy to see the fusion of the traditions of love poetry with the impulses of
mysticism:
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96 A History of Iran

Since my heart was caught in the snare of love,

Since my soul became wine in the cup of love,
Ah, the pains I have known through loverhood
Since like a hawk I fell in the snare of love!
Trapped in time, I am turned to a drunken sot
By the exciting, dreg-draining cup of love.
Dreading the fierce affliction of loverhood,
I dare not utter the very name of love;
And the more amazing is this, since I see
Every creature on earth is at peace with love.33

Here, too, wine has become a metaphor for love, taking the imagery into
another dimension of complexity. Where an orthodox Muslim might favor
abstinence (zohd) in accordance with religious law, Sana’i says that in going
beyond law into infidelity (kofr)—leaving behind his venal, carnal soul
(nafs)—the Sufi can find another way to God. The point is that both love
and wine can be ways in which a man may forget himself. They are familiar
experiences in which the sense of self is changed or obliterated. Such an ex-
perience can give a taste of (and therefore provide a metaphor for) the loss of
self experienced by the mystic in the face of God—the loss of self that is
necessary for genuine religious experience, that is yearned for as the lover
longs for the beloved.
The Seljuk period produced a profusion of poets, and it is not possible to
do justice to them all, but Nizami Ganjavi, who composed his Khosraw va
Shirin in 1180 and Layla va Majnoun in 1188, is too important to be over-
looked. Though he wrote many others, both these long poems retold much
older stories—the former a tale from the Sassanid court and the latter of
Arab origin. Both are love stories that became hugely popular, but they have
deeper resonances, reflecting Nizami’s religious beliefs. Layla and Majnoun
fall in love, but then are separated, and Majnoun goes mad (Majnoun means
“mad”) and wanders in the wilderness. He becomes a poet, writing to Layla
through a third party:
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Islam and Invasions 97

Oh my love, with your breasts like jasmine! Loving you, my life fades, my lips
wither, my eyes are full of tears. You cannot imagine how much I am “Majnoun.”
For you, I have lost myself. But that path can only be taken by those who forget
themselves. In love, the faithful have to pay with the blood of their hearts; other-
wise their love is not worth a grain of rye. So you are leading me, revealing the
true faith of love, even if your faith should remain hidden forever.34

Without hope in his love (Layla’s father will not let them marry), Maj-
noun spiritualizes it. In going into the desert, losing his selfhood in mad-
ness, stepping outside all ordinary conventions, and writing poetry, he has
effectively become a Sufi.35 So even this overtly profane story has a spiritual
dimension that is not immediately apparent. But to have psychological force,
the metaphor and the spiritual message first require our sympathy with the
lovers’ predicament. The poem is not simply about the Sufi’s approach to
God. It is that, but also a love story—and therein lies its human appeal. It
has been translated into almost every language in the Islamic world, as well
as many others beyond it.
Farid al-Din Attar, who lived in Nishapur from around 1158 to around
1221 or 1229, wrote more than forty-five thousand lines of verse in his life-
time. Establishing the elements of a “religion of love,” Attar strongly influ-
enced all subsequent Sufi poets. He developed the idea of the qalandar, the
wild man, the outcast, whose only guide is the ethic of that religion:

Har ke ra dar ‘eshq mohkam shod qadam

Dar-gozasht az kofr va az islam ham

Whoever sets foot firmly forward in love

Will go beyond both Islam and unbelief 36

The classic of Attar’s poetry is the Mantiq al-tayr (The Conference of the Birds),
one of the best-known Persian poems of all. Embedded within the charming
story of the birds questing for the mysterious phoenix—the simorgh—is the
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98 A History of Iran

story of Shaykh San‘an, which brings out the full meaning of Sufism in its logi-
cal extreme. Deliberately provocative and shocking in the Islamic context, the
story was important and influential in the later development of Sufism.
Shaykh San‘an is a learned, well-respected holy man who has always done
the right thing. He has made the pilgrimage to Mecca fifty times, has fasted
and prayed, and has taught four hundred pupils. He argues fine points of reli-
gious law and is admired by everyone. But he has a recurring dream, in which
he lives in Rum (by which was probably meant the Christian part of Anatolia,
or possibly Constantinople, rather than Rome itself ) and worships in a Chris-
tian church there. This is disturbing, and he concludes that to resolve the
problem he must go to the Christian territory. He sets off, but just short of his
goal he sees a Christian girl—“In beauty’s mansion she was like a sun. . . . ”

Her eyes spoke promises to those in love,

Their fine brows arched coquettishly above—
Those brows sent glancing messages that seemed
To offer everything her lovers dreamed.

And, as sometimes happens, the old man falls in love:

“I have no faith” he cried. “The heart I gave

Is useless now; I am the Christian’s slave.”

His companions try to get Shaykh San‘an to see reason, but he answers
them in terms even more shocking and subversive. They tell him to pray, and
he agrees—but instead of toward Mecca, as a Muslim should, he asks to
know where her face is, that he may pray in her direction. Another asks him
whether he does not regret turning away from Islam, and he answers that he
only regrets his previous folly, and that he had not fallen in love before. An-
other says he has lost his wits, and he says he has, and also his fame—but
fraud and fear along with them. Another urges him to confess his shame be-
fore God, and he replies, “God Himself has lit this flame.”
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Islam and Invasions 99

The shaykh lives for a month with the dogs in the dust of the street in
front of his beloved’s house, finally falling ill. He begs her to show him some
pity, a little affection, but she laughs and mocks him, saying that he is old—
he should be looking for a shroud, not for love. He begs again, and she says
he must do four things to win her trust—burn the Qor’an, drink wine, seal
up faith’s eye, and bow down to images. The shaykh hesitates, but then agrees.
Invited in, he takes wine and gets drunk:

He drank, oblivion overwhelmed his soul.

Wine mingled with his love—her laughter seemed
To challenge him to take the bliss he dreamed.

He agrees to everything the girl demands, but it is not enough—she

wants gold and silver, and he is poor. Eventually she takes pity on him. She
will overlook the gold and silver—if he will look after some pigs for a year as
a swineherd. He agrees.
From this extreme point, the story takes a more conventional turn, as was
necessary if the book was not to be banned and destroyed. A vision of the
Prophet intervenes, the shaykh returns to the faith, the girl repents her
treatment of the shaykh, becomes a Muslim, and dies. But this cannot draw
the sting of the first part of the story—the message that conventional piety
is not enough, that it may in fact lead down the wrong path, and that the
peeling away of conventional trappings and the loss of self in love is the only
way to attain a higher spirituality. As Attar wrote at the beginning, when he
introduced the story:

When neither Blasphemy nor faith remain,

The body and the Self have both been slain;
Then the fierce fortitude the Way will ask
Is yours, and you are worthy of our task.
Begin the journey without fear; be calm;
Forget what is and what is not Islam . . .
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100 A History of Iran

Taken as a whole, the story appears ambiguous, but it contains a startling

challenge to the religious conventions of the time.37
Attar, the apostle of love, died at some point in the 1220s—massacred
along with most of the population of Nishapur when the Mongols invaded
Khorasan and Persia. The Mongol invasions were an unparalleled cataclysm
for the lands of Iran. Where the Arabs and Turks had been relatively familiar
and restrained conquerors, the Mongols were both alien and wantonly cruel.
The Seljuk Empire had been split toward the end of the twelfth century
by the rise of a subject tribe from Khwarezm, whose leaders established
themselves as the rulers of the eastern part of the empire. They were known
as the Khwarezmshahs. In the early years of the thirteenth century, the rul-
ing Khwarezmshah, Sultan Mohammad, became dimly aware that a new
power was rising in the steppe lands beyond Transoxiana. There were im-
possible rumors—true, as it turned out—that the Chinese empire had been
conquered. There may have been some attempts at diplomatic contact, but
these were bungled, resulting in the deaths of some Mongol merchants and
ambassadors. Contrary to popular perception, the Mongols were not just a
ravening mob of uncivilized, semi-human killers. Their armies were tightly
controlled, well disciplined, and ruthlessly efficient. They were not wantonly
destructive.38 But their ultimate foundation was the prestige of their war-
lord, Genghis Khan, and an insult could not be overlooked. After the killing
of the Mongol emissaries, what came next in Transoxiana and Khorasan was
particularly dreadful because of the Mongols’ vengeful purpose. There fol-
lowed a series of Mongol invasions, aimed initially at punishing Sultan Mo-
hammad—who, veering from tragedy toward comedy, fled westward to Ray,
pursued by a Mongol flying column, and then north until he died on an is-
land off the Caspian coast. These invasions later developed into conquest
and occupation. What this meant for the hapless Iranians can be illustrated
by what happened at Merv, after the Mongols had already conquered and
destroyed the cities of Transoxiana:

. . . on the next day, 25 February 1221, the Mongols arrived before the gates of
Merv. Tolui in person [the son of Genghiz Khan], with an escort of five hundred
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0465019205-text_Layout 1 12/28/09 5:49 PM Page 101

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102 A History of Iran

horsemen, rode the whole distance around the walls, and for six days the
Mongols continued to inspect the defences, reaching the conclusion that they
were in good repair and would withstand a lengthy siege. On the seventh day
the Mongols launched a general assault. The townspeople made two sallies
from different gates, being in both cases at once driven back by the Mongol
forces. They seem then to have lost all will to resist. The next day the governor
surrendered the town, having been reassured by promises that were not in fact
to be kept. The whole population was now driven out into the open country,
and for four days and nights the people continued to pour out of the town.
Four hundred artisans and a number of children were selected to be carried
off as slaves, and it was commanded that the whole of the remaining popula-
tion, men, women, children, should be put to the sword. They were distrib-
uted, for this purpose, among the troops, and to each individual soldier was
allotted the execution of three to four hundred persons. These troops in-
cluded levies from the captured towns, and Juvaini records that the people of
Sarakhs, who had a feud with the people of Merv, exceeded the ferocity of the
heathen Mongols in the slaughter of their fellow-Muslims. Even now the or-
deal of Merv was not yet over. When the Mongols withdrew, those who had
escaped death by concealing themselves in holes and cavities emerged from
their hiding places. They amounted in all to some five thousand people. A de-
tachment of Mongols, part of the rearguard, now arrived before the town.
Wishing to have their share of the slaughter they called upon these unfortu-
nate wretches to come out into the open country, each carrying a skirtful of
grain. And having them thus at their mercy they massacred these last feeble
remnants of one of the greatest cities of Islam. . . .39

Contemporary eyewitnesses at Merv gave estimates for the numbers

killed ranging between 700,000 and 1.3 million. These figures are huge but
credible, representing a high proportion of the population of northern Kho-
rasan and Transoxiana at the time. The numbers were probably greater than
normal because country people and refugees from tens and hundreds of
miles around fled there before the siege began. When we talk of the magni-
tude of twentieth-century massacres and genocides as if they were unparal-
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Islam and Invasions 103

leled, we sometimes forget what enormities were perpetrated in earlier cen-

turies with the cold blade alone. A skirtful of grain. The Nishapur of Omar
Khayyam, Tus, Herat, and other cities in Khorasan suffered the same fate.
The only option for the citizens other than massacre was immediate capitu-
lation as soon as the Mongol columns hove into sight.
Some places, encouraged by rumors of resistance by Sultan Mohammad’s
son, Jalal al-Din, tried to hold their towns against the invaders, and suffered
terribly as a result. But by the end of 1231, despite having achieved a string
of brilliant victories against the Mongols and others, and a legend of razm o
bazm to rival the heroes of Ferdowsi, Jalal al-Din was dead. It might have
been better for the people of Iran, at this critical time, if the Khwarezmshah
had been a wiser man with less panache.
Khorasan suffered terribly again as the Mongols moved in to punish
those who continued to resist, and to set up their occupation regime. In Tus,
which they made their base, the Mongols initially found only fifty houses
still standing.40 The golden age of Khorasan was over, and in some parts of
the region agriculture never really recovered. Where there had been towns
and irrigated fields, the war horses of the conquerors and their confederates
now were turned out to graze. Wide expanses of Iran reverted to nomad
pastoralism, but these nomads were more dangerous, ruthless mounted war-
riors of a different kind. Peasants were subjected to taxes that were ruinously
high and were collected after the fashion of a military campaign. Many fled
the land or were forced into slavery, while those artisan city dwellers who
had survived the massacres were forced to labor in workhouses for their con-
querors. Minorities suffered, too. In the 1280s a Jew was appointed as vizier
by the Mongols, but his appointment grew unpopular, he fell from office,
and Jews were attacked by Muslims in the cities, establishing a dismal pat-
tern for later centuries: “[They] fell upon the Jews in every city of the empire, to
wreak their vengeance upon them for the degradation which they had suffered from the
Mongols.”41 It was a grim time indeed. Khorasan was more affected than
other parts, but the general collapse of the economy hit the entire region.
The Mongols, who made Tabriz their capital, spent the next few decades
consolidating their conquests and destroying the Ismaili Assassins in the
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104 A History of Iran

Alborz mountains, just as the Seljuks had tried and failed to do for many
years before 1220. Some smaller rulers who had submitted to the Mongols
were allowed to continue as vassals, and in the west the rump of the Seljuk
Empire survived in Anatolia on the same basis as the Sultanate of Rum. In
1258 the Mongols took Baghdad. They killed the last Abbasid caliph by
wrapping him in a carpet and trampling him to death with horses.
Yet within a few decades, astoundingly, or perhaps predictably, the Per-
sian class of scholars and administrators had pulled off their trick of con-
quering the conquerors—for the third time. Before long they made
themselves indispensable. A Shi‘a astrologer, Naser od-Din Tusi, captured
by the Mongols at the end of the campaign against the Ismailis, had taken
service with the Mongol prince Hulagu, and served as his adviser in the
campaign against Baghdad. Naser od-Din Tusi then set up an astronomical
observatory for Hulagu in Azerbaijan. One member of the Persian Juvayni
family became governor of Baghdad and wrote the history of the Mongols;
another became the vizier of a later Mongol Il-Khan, or king. Within a cou-
ple of generations Persian officials were as firmly in place at the court of the
Il-Khans as they had been with the Seljuks, the Ghaznavids, and earlier dy-
nasties. The Mongols initially retained their paganism, but in 1295 their
Buddhist ruler converted to Islam along with his army. In 1316 his son Ol-
jeitu died and was buried in a mausoleum that still stands in Soltaniyeh—
one of the grandest monuments of Iranian Islamic architecture and a
monument also to the resilience and assimilating power of Iranian culture.
Another important invasion took place a little earlier than the Mongol in-
vasion of Khorasan—the invasion and conquest of India by Muslim Per-
sians and Turks, establishing what became known as the Delhi Sultanate.
We have seen already that the Parthians and Sassanids at different times in-
vaded northern India and established dynasties that ruled there. The Ghaz-
navids and their provincial governors also raided into northern India, and
one such governor, Mohammad Ghuri, took that practice a step further in
the latter part of the twelfth century, conquering Multan, Sind, Lahore, and
Delhi. A series of dynasties followed thereafter, expanding the reach of the
Delhi Sultanate east into Bengal and south to the Deccan, creating a unique
Indo-Islamic culture that fused Persian, Hindustani, Arabic, and Turkic ele-
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Islam and Invasions 105

ments, and—in the northwest—the Urdu language. Northern India came

under strong Islamic influence. Sufi missionaries set to work, and it became
an important region for the development of Persianate culture in the follow-
ing centuries.

Culmination: Rumi, Iraqi, Sa’di, and Hafez

The reassertion of Persian influence over the conquerors is not the only ex-
traordinary feature of the period following the Mongol conquest. One might
have thought that the poetry would come to a halt, or at least a hiatus, in the
grim, blackened aftermath of the Mongol conquest. But three of the very
greatest Persian poets flourished at this time, to be followed by the fourth a
little later. Rumi was born in 1207, Iraqi in 1211, Sa’di some time in the
same decade, and Hafez a century later. Iranians themselves normally con-
sider Rumi, Hafez, and Sa’di to be (with Ferdowsi) the greatest of their poets,
and it is not possible in a small space to do more than give a sense of who
they were and the merest taste of what they wrote. Iraqi is likewise an im-
portant figure, especially in Sufism. Together these poets represent the cul-
mination of literary development in Persian since the Arab conquest.
Jalal al-Din Molavi Rumi (normally called Mawlana by Iranians) was
born in Balkh in 1207. It was not a good time or place. His father, like others
fearing the approach of the Mongols, left Balkh in 1219, initially for Mecca
on the hajj, later to Konya in Anatolia. Rumi spent most of the rest of his life
in Konya. Initially he lived, as had his father, as an orthodox member of the
ulema, preaching and studying according to the Hanafi school. He also
learned about Sufism, but around 1244 he turned to it entirely under the in-
fluence of another Sufi mystic and poet, Shams-e Tabrizi, with whom Rumi
had an intense emotional friendship (at least). Then, three or four years
later, Shams disappeared, perhaps murdered. Between that time and his
own death in 1273, Rumi wrote about sixty-five thousand lines of poetry.
His poetry is a world of its own—a highly complex mystical world that has
become popular in the United States in recent years. Some say Rumi is the
most popular poet in the United States today, at least in the sense that his
books sell better than those of other poets. Some of Rumi’s most famous
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106 A History of Iran

lines, which come from the opening of his masnavi, express the longing of
the soul for union with God:

Now listen to this reed-flute’s deep lament

About the heartache being apart has meant:
Since from the reed-bed they uprooted me
My song’s expressed each human’s agony,
A breast which separation’s split in two
Is what I seek, to share this pain with you:
When kept from their origin, all yearn
For union on the day they can return . . .
...
The reed consoles those forced to be apart,
Its notes will lift the veil upon your heart,
Where’s antidote or poison like its song
Or confidant, or one who’s pined so long?
This reed relates a tortuous path ahead,
Recalls the love with which Majnoun’s heart bled:
The few who hear the truths the reed has sung
Have lost their wits so they can speak this tongue . . . 42

And this is the simple idea at the core of Rumi’s thought—the unity of
God, the unity of the human spirit with God, and the yearning for reunion
with God (Plato puts a similar idea into the mouth of Aristophanes in the
Symposium). Rumi expresses the same idea in a different way in the following
ruba’i (the Beloved was a common Sufi term signifying God):

Ma’shuq chu aftab taban gardad

‘Asheq bemesal-e zarre gardan gardad
Chun bad-e bahar-e eshq jonban gardad
Har shakh ke khoshk nist raqsan gardad

The Beloved starts shining like the sun,

And the lover begins to whirl like a dust-mote.
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Islam and Invasions 107

When the spring wind of love begins to move,

Any branch that is not withered starts to dance43

Many of Rumi’s poems contain overt or concealed references to Shams-e

Tabrizi: shams in Arabic means sun, and the reference is obvious. But this
does not mean that the Beloved is simply Shams; the Beloved is also God,
the sun, and in a sense Rumi himself.
Fakhroddin al-Iraqi, despite his name, was an Iranian born near
Hamadan in 1211. At the time that western province was known as Iraq-e
Ajam—the Iraq of the Ajam, the non-Arabs—in other words, the Persians.
Hence the name al-Iraqi. The stories about Iraqi’s life give us a vivid idea of
his personality, which was unashamedly eccentric. This fits with and adds to
the sense of his personality as conveyed by his poems. Iraqi showed an early
facility for learning and scholarship, but his head was turned in his teens by
the arrival in Hamadan of some Sufi qalandar—wild men. Iraqi joined them
without hesitation:

We’ve moved our bedrolls from the mosque to the tavern of ruin [kharabat]
We’ve scribbled all over the page of asceticism and erased all miracles of piety.
Now we sit with the lovers in the lane of the Magians
And drink a cup from the hands of the dissolute people of the tavern.
If the heart should tweak the ear of respectability now, why not?44

In another poem he says:

All fear of God, all self-denial I deny; bring wine, nothing but wine
For in all sincerity I repent my worship which is but hypocrisy.
Yes, bring me wine, for I have renounced all renunciation
And all my vaunted self-righteousness seems to me but swagger and self-display.45

Iraqi went traveling with the other beggars. He wrote many poems about
the beauty of young men and boys, and the homoerotic strain in Persian poetry
is especially plain in his work. But his contemporary defenders claimed that
he only admired the boys longingly from afar. Eventually, he came under the
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108 A History of Iran

influence of a follower of the Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi, perhaps the great-
est thinker of Islamic mysticism, who had died in 1240.
Ibn Arabi’s thought—steeped primarily in the Qor’an and the tradi-
tions of the hadith, but influenced also by Neoplatonism and the thinking
of earlier Sufis—elaborated what appears very like a version of Plato’s
theory of forms: that phenomena in the material world are manifestations
of original, essential truths in a higher sphere (itself an idea possibly de-
rived from Iranian Mazdaism, as we saw earlier). Therefore true reality lay
paradoxically in the spiritual, metaphysical world beyond, of which the
physical world was a mere shadow. Central also to Ibn Arabi’s thinking
were ideas of the oneness of God’s creation (wahdat al-wujud) and of the
imagination (khiyal).
Another very significant concept that Ibn Arabi developed from the for-
mulae of earlier thinkers was the idea of the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil).
According to this notion the sphere of existence that is not God is divided
between the macrocosm, the world beyond Man, and the microcosm, the
inner world of Man. These two worlds reflect each other, and through reli-
gious contemplation and self-development, Man can “polish his soul” until
the two worlds are congruent. Man can improve and perfect himself until
he takes on the form of the divine, becoming the Perfect Man.46 He can
then become a conduit for the will of God in the world. This state is
achieved by religious discipline and mystical devotion, an idea that was to
have great significance in later Islamic thinking. Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini was fascinated by these ideas and wrote one of his earliest books
about a later commentary on the Fusus al-Hikam (Seals of Wisdom) of Ibn
Arabi.
Consider also the following extract, about the possibility of a mystic be-
ing able to visit the alternative Earth of True Reality:

Then he meets those Forms who stand and keep watch at the entrances to the
ways of approach, God having especially assigned them this task. One of them
hastens towards the newcomer, clothes him in a robe suitable to his rank,
takes him by the hand, and walks with him over that Earth and they do in it
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Islam and Invasions 109

as they will. He lingers to look at the divine works of art; every stone, every
tree, every village, every single thing he comes across, he may speak with, if he
wishes, as a man converses with a companion. . . . When he has attained his
object and thinks of returning to his dwelling place, his companion goes with
him and takes him back to the place at which he entered. There she says good-
bye to him; she takes off the robe in which she had clothed him and departs
from him . . . 47

The idea that the world of experience was a mere shadow of the real world
of forms beyond had great potential for metaphor in spiritual poetry, and
traces of this idea can be seen in many of the Persian poets. They reached
their apotheosis with Shabestari, who in his Gulshan-e raz put forward a full-
fledged aesthetic according to which eyebrows, curls, or the down on the
beloved’s upper lip might represent heavenly or metaphysical concepts.
Iraqi was devoted to the ideas of Ibn Arabi for the rest of his life. He
wrote his Divine Flashes in exposition of them, and when he died in 1289 he
was buried next to Ibn Arabi in Damascus. But he never settled down to a
conventional life. One story says that when he arrived in Cairo on his trav-
els, the sultan honored him by setting him on his own horse and giving him
some splendid clothes; but as he rode through the streets accompanied by
many other scholars and dignitaries on foot, Iraqi suddenly snatched off his
turban and put it on the saddle in front of him. Seeing him traveling in such
splendor, but bareheaded, the people watching laughed. When the sultan
heard about it he was displeased, because it made him look ridiculous. Iraqi
explained that he had removed the turban to avoid sin. As he rode along it
occurred to him that no one had ever been so honored, and as he felt his ego
rise up he had deliberately humbled himself.48
Some commentators feel that Iraqi’s poetry was better and livelier before
his encounter with the thought of Ibn Arabi—that it became overburdened
metaphysically afterward. But there is something especially touching about
Iraqi and his poetry, especially his early work. It shows perhaps more clearly
than any other Sufi poetry the urge to dispense with the self-regarding piety
and the holier-than-thou observance of mere rules pursued by the orthodox.
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110 A History of Iran

It also shocks and provokes the orthodox by blatant flouting of their rules.
In this, the impulse driving the Sufis is very close to the teachings of Jesus
against the Pharisees (“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!”). Jesus is
revered by many Iranian Muslims (not just Sufis) for this trait—for
speaking from the heart of spirituality and avoiding getting caught up in
its trappings.
With Sa’di and Hafez we begin to run out of superlatives. Both have had
a profound influence on the thinking of ordinary Iranians, and phrases
from their poems are common sayings. Teachers of the Persian language
used to use Sa’di’s Golestan (Garden of Roses) to teach their pupils, having
them memorize excerpts in order to help them absorb vocabulary and re-
member grammar and patterns of usage. His works were some of the first
to be translated into European languages in the eighteenth century. One
passage from the Golestan appears above the entrance to the United Nations
in New York:

Bani-Adam a’za-ye yek-digarand

Ke dar afarinesh ze yek gawharand
Chu ‘ozvi be dard avarad ruzegar
Digar ozvha ra numanat qarar

All men are fellow-members of one body

For they were created from one essence
When fate afflicts one limb with pain
The other limbs may not stay unmoved

And it continues:

Tu kaz mehnat-e digaran dighami

Nashayad ke namat nahand adami

You who are without sorrow for the suffering of others

You do not deserve to be called human
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Islam and Invasions 111

Sa’di was born in Shiraz (a city saved from Mongol destruction by the
wise decision of its ruler to submit to them early), probably sometime be-
tween 1213 and 1219. In his poems there are many stories about his travels,
some of which are dubious. He was back in Shiraz by around 1256, and died
there in 1292. He was familiar with Sufism but was not openly a devotee.
His Bustan (The Orchard) is an extended poem of moral tales, not only en-
couraging wisdom and virtue, humility and kindness, but also common
sense and pragmatism. Some of these features emerge in the following story
of Omar and the beggar (Omar was the second caliph, after Abu Bakr—one
of the four Righteous Caliphs of Sunni Islam):

I’ve heard there was a beggar in a narrow place,

On whose foot Omar placed his own;
The hapless pauper, knowing not who he was
(For in anger one knows not enemy from friend),
Flew at him, saying “Are you blind, then?”
At which the just commander, Omar, said to him:
“Blind I am not, but I did slip
Unwittingly; pray, remit my sin.”
How even-handed were the great ones of the Faith
To deal thus with subordinates.
Much will be made tomorrow of those who cultivate humility,
While the heads of mighty men hang low for embarrassment;
If you’re afraid of the Day of Judgement,
Remit the slips of those afraid of you;
Oppress not your subordinates with impunity,
For over your hand lies a hand likewise49

Some have thought that Sa’di’s pragmatism strayed too far in the direction
of relativism and amorality, citing for example the well-known dictum from
the first story in the Golestan that “an expedient falsehood is preferable to a mischie-
vous truth.”50 But Sa’di is not the only literary figure to have made such a sug-
gestion—one could draw a similar moral from playwright Henrik Ibsen’s
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112 A History of Iran

Wild Duck without concluding that Ibsen was an amoral relativist. Sa’di’s
views are diverse and sometimes appear contradictory, but that is a reflection
of the complexities he addressed. It is right that Sa’di became known for his
epigrams because he had a gift for communicating pithy thoughts in vivid
language:

Ananke pari-ruy o shekar goftarand

Hayfast ke ru-ye khub penhan darand
Fi’l-jomle neqab niz bifayede nist
Ta zesht bepushand o niku bogzarand

Those nymph-faced, sugar-speaking ones,

What a pity they should hide their fair faces.
But the veil is not worthless either;
The ugly should put it on, and the beautiful, off.51

And:

Ya ru-ye bekonj-e khalvat avar shab o ruz

Ya atash-e ‘eshq bar kon o khaneh besuz
Masturi o ‘asheqi beham nayad rast
Gar pardeh nakhahi ke darad dideh beduz

Either choose a corner of seclusion day and night

Or light love’s fire and let the house burn.
Concealment and love do not get on well.
If you do not want the veil torn, seal up your eyes52

Hafez too was born in Shiraz, but a century later—about 1315.

“Hafez” is a pen name, signifying that he had learned the Qor’an by
heart; his real name was Shams al-Din Mohammad Shirazi. Little is
known of his life. He died around 1390, when the impact of Timur
(Tamerlane) was beginning to be felt—another round of invasions, war-
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Islam and Invasions 113

fare, and mass killings to rival that of the Mongols in ferocity and misery.
The scholar A. J. Arberry believed that one of Hafez’s last ghazals was
prompted by these new disasters:

Again the times are out of joint; and again

For wine and the Beloved’s languid glance I am fain.
The wheel of fortune is a marvellous thing:
What next proud head to the lowly dust will it bring?

’Tis a famous tale, the deceitfulness of earth;

The night is pregnant: what will dawn bring to birth?
Tumult and bloody battle rage in the plain:
Bring blood-red wine, and fill the cup again.53

But before the skies darkened again with the smoke of war and massacre,
Hafez took the previous patterns of Persian poetry and elevated them to
new, unsurpassed heights of expression. In the following ghazal the familiar
images of wine and the Beloved ripple, interfere, overlap, reflect each other,
and thereby transcend the immediate eroticism, pointing beyond desire to
the world of the spirit. It is saying that if love is offered, it must be taken; and
if taken, it must be drunk to the dregs because love demands full commit-
ment. Only then can its true significance be grasped—that love is the essen-
tial gift, the essence of life, given to us before time:

Her hair was still tangled, her mouth still drunk

And laughing, her shoulders sweaty, the blouse
Torn open, singing love songs, her wine cup full.
Her eyes were looking for a fight, her lips
Ready for jibes. She sat down
Last night at midnight on my bed.
She put her lips close to my ear and said
In a whisper these words: ‘What is this?
Aren’t you my old lover—Are you asleep?’
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114 A History of Iran

The friend of wisdom who receives

This wine that steals sleep is a traitor to love
If he doesn’t worship that same wine.
Oh you prudes, go away. Stop arguing with those
Who drink the bitter dregs, because it was precisely
This gift the divine ones gave us before Eternity.
Whatever God poured into our cup
We drank, whether it was the wine
Of heaven or the wine of drunkenness.
The laughter of the wine, and the dishevelled curls of the Beloved
Oh, how many nights of repentance—like those of Hafez
Have been broken by moments like this?54

Poems like this unsettle many Iranians even today.55 Some religious Irani-
ans will say directly that these poems are not really about wine or erotic love
at all—that the meaning is entirely on a spiritual level, and that the poets
themselves never touched wine. Whether or not that is true (and personally
I doubt it), the fact is that the poems only work if the eroticism and the alco-
holic intoxication are real. Rather, they work because they are real, because
they ring true and speak directly to our own experience as only great litera-
ture can. They seem to remind us of something we had always known but
had somehow forgotten. Otherwise the metaphors would be just a device,
the rebellion against convention no more than a pose. This poetry has more
bite, more impact than that. Hafez wrote the following in a period of offi-
cious imposition of religious orthodoxy (and some have pointed up its rele-
vance in contemporary Iran):

Bovad aya ke dar-e maykadeha bogshayand

Gereh az kar-e forubaste-ye ma bogshayand
Agar az bahr-e del-e zahed-e khodbin bastand
Del qavi dar ke az bahr-e khoda bogshayand

Might they open the doors of the wine shops

And loosen their hold on our knotted lives?
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Islam and Invasions 115

If shut to satisfy the ego of the puritan

Take heart, for they will reopen to satisfy God.56

In later times Hafez was appreciated and translated by Goethe, whose

enthusiasm for this poetry reflected that of many other Europeans. As for
the Persians, they so revered Hafez that his Divan (the conventional term for
a book collecting a poet’s work in one volume) was used as an oracle, and
sometimes is still. People wanting to know their fortune open it at random
in the hope of texts that can be interpreted as optimistic predictions. The
only other book used in that way is the Qor’an.

Ay bad, hadis-e man nahanash migu

Serr-e del-e man be sad zabanash migu
Migu na bedansan ke malalash girad
Migu sokhani o dar miyanash migu

O wind, tell her my story secretly.

Tell her my heart’s secret in a hundred tongues.
Tell her, but not in a way that may offend her.
Speak to her and between the words tell her my story.57

Persians did not stop writing poetry in the fifteenth century. There were
many important poets after Hafez—notably Jami, and later Bidel. By that
time a body of literature of unparalleled importance had been created. It is
literature of almost inconceivable quantity, great diversity, and sublime qual-
ity. One could compare this body of literature to a human brain and think of
it in the way that some theorists now consider human consciousness—that
consciousness is not located in any one part of the brain, but is instead the
consequence of the impossibly complex interaction of millions of different
cells and their sparking synapses. Somehow, out of this poetry and the com-
binations and interactions of the ideas and metaphors contained within
them emerged the Iranian soul.
Every hundred years or so, the reading public in the West discovers an-
other of these Persian poets. In 1800 it was Hafez, in 1900 Omar Khayyam,
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116 A History of Iran

in 2000 it is Rumi. The choice depends not so much on the merits or true
nature of the poets or their poetry, but more on their capacity to be inter-
preted in accordance with passing Western literary and cultural fashions. So
Hafez was interpreted to fit with the mood of Romanticism, Omar
Khayyam with the aesthetic movement, and it has been Rumi’s misfortune
to be befriended by numb-brained New Agery. Of course, an attentive and
imaginative reader can avoid the solipsistic trap, especially if he or she can
read even a little Persian. But the mirror of language and translation means
that the reader may see only a hazy but consoling reflection of himself and
his times, rather than looking into the true depths of the poetry—which
might be more unsettling.
On the surface, the religion of love of these Sufi poets from eight hun-
dred years ago might seem rather distant and archaic. That is belied less by
the burgeoning popularity of Rumi and Attar than by the deeper message of
these poets. Darwinists who, like Richard Dawkins, believe Darwinism in-
eluctably entails atheism might be upset by the idea, but what could be more
appropriate to an intellectual world that has abandoned creationism for evo-
lution theory than a religion of love? Darwinism and evolutionary theory
have demonstrated the intense focus of all life on the act of reproduction,
the act of love. The spirit of that act and the drive behind it are the spirit of
life itself. What could be more fitting than a religion that uses the emotional
drive behind that act as a metaphor for a higher spirituality, and its longing
as a longing for union with the Godhead—“This gift the divine ones gave us be-
fore Eternity.”

Timur
After about 1300 (notably under the ruler Ghazan Khan) the Mongol Il-
Khans, becoming Islamized and Persianized, reversed their extractive, de-
structive, slash-and-burn style of rule. They began trying to reconstruct cities
they had destroyed, trying to resurrect systems of irrigation and agriculture
that had been abandoned. They had some success, and the new capital Tabriz
certainly prospered. Azerbaijan, with its wetter climate, was favored generally
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Islam and Invasions 117

by the conquering horsemen for the better pasture it offered. The great histo-
rian Rashid al-Din (a converted Jew) enjoyed the patronage of the Il-Khans
and, building on the earlier works of Juvaini and others, wrote a huge and de-
finitive history. The cultural flow was not all one way—Persian miniature
painting was permanently influenced by an imported Chinese aesthetic, and
there were other examples. But Iran under the Il-Khans, for all the signs of
regeneration, was a poorer, harsher place than before. The empire of the Il-
Khans began to fragment with an almost deterministic inevitability. Local
vassal rulers slowly made themselves independent of the center, as had hap-
pened before under the Seljuks and the Abbasids.
In the mid-fourteenth century in Khorasan, around Sabzavar, a rebel
movement called the sarbedari (heads-in-noose) arose. It displayed egalitar-
ian tendencies and co-opted Shi‘a and Sufi elements.58 Like some later and
earlier movements, the sarbedari show the eclectic nature of popular,
provincial religion in Iran at this time. Elsewhere, the Shi‘a and the Sufis
tended to be in opposition, but the sarbedari seem to have had little diffi-
culty fusing the apparently contradictory tenets of the different beliefs in-
volved, and this creative ferment of popular religion was to prove important
later, too. The sarbedari are also significant in another way—they represent
again a spirit of popular resistance to the invaders, independent of contin-
gent dynastic leadership. This same spirit was there after the Arab invasion,
at the beginning of the Mongol period,59 and it appears again later in Iranian
history. This might prompt questions about nationalism that could easily
absorb the rest of this book.60 What we call nationalism today is in my view
too specifically a constructed phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries to be considered without anachronism in the fourteenth century
or other earlier periods. But we have seen that there was a sense of Iranian-
ness, beyond local or dynastic loyalty, in the time of the Sassanids and be-
fore; it was part of what later inspired the shu’ubiyya, the Samanids, and
Ferdowsi. Nationalism is the wrong word, but to deny any Iranian identity
in this era requires some serious contortions of evidence and logic.
From 1380, the hopeful vassal dynasty builders, the resurgent cities and
peasants, and the bold sarbedari were all alike submerged by the next invading
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118 A History of Iran

surge of steppe nomads under Timur (Timur-e lang—Timur the Lame—

Tamerlane or, in Marlowe, Tamburlaine). Timur was the son of a minor
Turkic vassal in Transoxiana, who set up a following of warriors and built a
tightly disciplined army explicitly on the model of the great Mongol,
Genghis Khan. He married a princess from the great Khan family and
called himself Güregen (which means son-in-law) to draw on the prestige of
his predecessor. He also took Mongol precedent as a precedent for terror.
Timur established himself first in the cities of Transoxiana, with a base at
Samarkand, and then invaded Persia. Cities were razed, their citizens massa-
cred, and the plunder sent with any valuable survivors back to Samarkand,
to adorn a new paradise of gardens and grand buildings. To intimidate his
enemies, Timur raised up pillars of human heads as he marched through the
Persian provinces—outside Isfahan alone (where the people had been fool-
ish enough to attack the Timurid garrison) he lopped off seventy thousand
heads, which were then set in 120 pillars. In his bloody wake the desert again
encroached on abandoned farmlands and irrigation works. Unlike the Mon-
gols, Timur conquered in the name of orthodox Sunni Islam, but this in no
way moderated his conduct of war. After taking Persia and defeating the
Mongols of the Golden Horde in the steppe lands around Moscow, he
moved into India and took Delhi. Then he turned west again, where he con-
quered Baghdad (another ninety thousand heads), defeated the Ottoman
sultan, captured him, and returned to Samarkand. He died in 1405 in the
midst of preparations for an attack on China.
There is a story that Timur met Hafez, but it is probably apocryphal.
But Timur did meet the Arab historian and thinker Ibn Khaldun. No his-
torian looking at the history of the Islamic world in the period covered by
this chapter could avoid noticing the cyclical pattern of dynastic rise, de-
cline, and nomad invasion. But Ibn Khaldun came up with a theory to ex-
plain it.61 His theory began with the asabiyya, the strong solidarity or group
feeling of nomad warriors, fostered by the interdependence that was neces-
sary in mobile tribal life in the harsh conditions of desert, mountains, and
the margins of the steppes. This was the cohesive spirit that made the no-
mads such formidable warriors, that enabled them to invade and dominate
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Islam and Invasions 119

areas of sedentary settlement, and conquer cities. But having done so, their
leaders had to consolidate their support. They had to protect themselves
against being supplanted by other members of the tribe, and therefore gave
patronage to other groups—city dwellers, bureaucratic officials, and the
ulema. They also used building projects and a magnificent court to impress
their subjects with their prestige, and employed mercenaries as soldiers, be-
cause they were more reliable. So the original asabiyya of the conquerors
was diluted and lost. Eventually the ruling dynasty came to believe its own
myth and spent increasingly on vain display, weakening its strength outside
the capital city and within it. The ulema and ordinary citizens, disillu-
sioned with the dynasty’s decadence, became ready to welcome another
wave of conquering nomads, who would start up a new dynasty and set the
cycle off all over again.
The theory—of which the above is a greatly simplified version—does not
address all the elements of the cycle of invasions as they affected Iran. We
have seen how the prosperity of the Silk Route encouraged plundering inva-
sions as well as trade, and how the vulnerability of Iran (and particularly
Khorasan) flowed from its central geographical position, just as geography
gave it great economic and cultural advantages. The Abbasids and their suc-
cessors were weakened repeatedly by the measures they used to try to over-
come the difficulty of gathering taxes. Officials tended to become corrupt
and siphon off tax revenue, so the rulers gave the responsibility to tax farm-
ers instead; they then tended to plunder the peasant farmers, quickly run-
ning down the productivity of agriculture. The rulers could grant land
holdings (iqta, soyurgal) to soldiers in return for military service, but this
tended to mean in time that the soldiers came to think of themselves as
farmers or landowners rather than soldiers. Or they could do a similar thing
on a grander scale and grant whole provinces to trusted families in return for
fiscal tribute and military support. But as we have seen, the likelihood then
was that the provincial governors would grow powerful enough to become
independent and even take over the state themselves.
Ibn Khaldun’s theory does not fully explain the history of this period on
its own, and it may apply better to the Islamic states of North Africa, where
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120 A History of Iran

the historian lived for most of his life. But it is a useful model nonetheless,
and it also accounts for some deep attitudes among the people themselves.
Ibn Khaldun did not invent those attitudes, he observed them. The nomads
often were regarded (especially by themselves, of course) as having a primi-
tive martial virtue. The court was regarded as a decadent place that tended
to corrupt its members. The ulema might often be regarded as authoritative
arbitrators in a crisis. These were mental, social, and cultural structures that
in themselves helped to influence events.
For our purposes, the most important thing to emphasize is the resilience
and intellectual power of the small class of Persian scholar-bureaucrats.
Nostalgic for their heroic Sassanid ancestors, escaping from official duplicity
and courtiership into either dreams of love and gardens, religious mysticism,
the design of splendid palaces and mosques, or the complexities of mathe-
matics, astronomy, and medicine, they bounced back from crisis after crisis,
accommodated to their conquerors, made themselves indispensable again,
and eventually reasserted something like control over them. In the process,
they ensured (whether based in Baghdad, Balkh, Tabriz, or Herat) the sur-
vival of their language, their culture, and an unrivaled intellectual heritage. It
is one of the most remarkable phenomena in world history. Behind the his-
tory described in this chapter, the Arab conquest and the succession of em-
pires—Abbasid, Ghaznavid, Seljuk, Mongol, Timurid—lies the story of
what ultimately proved to be a more important empire: the Iranian Empire
of the Mind.
After Timur, the process followed its usual pattern. The conquerors took
on the characteristics of the conquered. Timur’s son Shahrokh ruled from
Herat and patronized the beginnings of another Persianate cultural flower-
ing that continued under his successors and produced great architecture,
manuscript illustrations, and painted miniatures, prefiguring later cultural
developments in the Moghul and Safavid empires. As others before, the
Timurid Empire gradually fragmented into a patchwork of dynastic successor-
states. In the latter part of the fifteenth century, two of them—two great
confederations of Mongolized Turkic tribes, the Aq-Qoyunlu and the Qara-
Qoyunlu (White Sheep and Black Sheep Turks, respectively)—slugged it out
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Islam and Invasions 121

for hegemony over the war-ravaged Iranian plateau. The White Sheep came
out on top, but were then overwhelmed by a new dynasty from Turkic Ana-
tolia, the Safavids. But to understand the Safavids it is necessary first to go
right back to the seventh century again for a deeper understanding of the
history and development of Shi‘ism.
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4
Shi‘ism and the Safavids

Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a

plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are
concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon
another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with
respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalisations,
only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognise in the
development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the
unforeseen. This is not a doctrine of cynicism and despair. The fact
of progress is written plain and large on the page of history; but
progress is not a law of nature. The ground gained by one
generation may be lost by the next. The thoughts of men may flow
into the channels which lead to disaster and barbarism.
—H. A. L. Fisher

The Origins of Shi‘ism

Early in October ad 6801 a group of less than one hundred armed men, ac-
companied by their families, approached the town of Kufa, south of the
present-day site of Baghdad, on the river Euphrates. They had come from
Mecca, hundreds of miles away across the Arabian Desert. As the travelers

123
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124 A History of Iran

and their leader, Hosein, drew near the town, they were intercepted by a
thousand mounted troops. The travelers agreed to move on to the north,
away from Kufa, escorted by the troops. The following day a further four
thousand men arrived with orders to make Hosein swear allegiance to the
caliph Yazid. Hosein refused. By now his people were running out of water,
and the soldiers blocked their way to the river.
After several days a new order arrived: Hosein and his followers should
be compelled to submit by force. The soldiers formed up in battle order and
bore down on Hosein’s smaller group. He tried to persuade his people to
save themselves and let him face their enemies alone, but they would not
leave him. He spoke to the troops confronting him, reproaching them. But
his enemies were obdurate and soon after began to shoot arrows into Ho-
sein’s camp. Completely outnumbered, Hosein’s men were killed one by one
as the arrows rained down among the tents and tethered animals. Some of
them fought back against their tormentors, charging in ones and twos into
the serried ranks that surrounded them, but they were soon killed. At last
Hosein was the only one left alive, holding the body of his infant son, who
had taken an arrow through the throat. The soldiers surrounded Hosein,
who fought hard until at last he was struck to the ground and one of them
finished him off.
Of Hosein’s male relatives only one of his sons survived (having lain ill in
the camp through the fighting). In Kufa, Hosein’s head was brought before
Yazid’s deputy, who struck the dead man’s face. A bystander reproached him
for striking the lips that the Prophet of God had once kissed.
Hosein was the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, through the
Prophet’s daughter Fatima and his cousin Ali. This account of the massacre
at Karbala of the Prophet’s closest family has been passed down by genera-
tions of Shi‘a Muslims. As always, there must have been another side to the
story. From another perspective the Umayyad caliphs might look less
wicked, more like pragmatists struggling to hold a disparate empire to-
gether, and Hosein, Ali, and their partisans more like incompetent idealists.
But the important thing is to understand how the Shi‘a themselves later un-
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Shi‘ism and the Safavids 125

derstood the story. Karbala was the central, defining event in the early his-
tory of Shi‘a Islam. The shrine of Hosein at Karbala, on the site where it
happened, is one of the most important Shi‘a holy places. Each year the an-
niversary (Ashura) is still marked with deep mourning, by mass religious
demonstrations and outpourings of pious grief. Ever since Karbala, Shi‘a
Muslims have brooded over the martyrdom of Hosein and its symbolism,
and have nursed a sense of grievance, betrayal, and shame.
The great schisms of the Christian church, between East and West, and
later between Catholic and Protestant, came centuries after the time of Christ.
But the great schism in Islam that still divides Muslims today, between Sunni
and Shi‘a, originated in the earliest days of the faith—even before Karbala, in
the time of the Prophet Mohammad himself. Comparisons with the Chris-
tian schisms do not really work. A more apposite analogy, as noted by the his-
torian Richard N. Frye and others,2 can be drawn between, on the one hand,
the emphasis on law and tradition in Sunni Islam and Judaism and, on the
other hand, the emphasis on humility, sacrifice, and the religious hierarchy in
Christianity and Shi‘ism. The public grief of Ashura is similar in spirit to that
which one can still see on Good Friday in some Catholic countries. The pur-
pose in making comparisons between Shi‘ism and various aspects of Christi-
anity is not to suggest that they are somehow the same (they are not), nor to
encourage some kind of happy joining-hands ecumenism (naïve), but rather
to try to illuminate something that initially looks unfamiliar, and to suggest by
analogy that it may not be so strange or unfamiliar after all. Or at least, that it
is no more strange than Christian Catholicism.
The term Shi‘a signifies Shi‘a Ali—the party of Ali. Ali was the Prophet’s
cousin, and one of Mohammad’s earliest converts. The Shi‘a (sometimes
called Alids at this early phase) were simply those who favored rule by both
the blood descendants of Ali and the Prophet. Other characteristics and
doctrines only developed later.
From the beginning, Mohammad’s followers, the earliest Muslims, had
run into conflict with temporal authority. Mohammad, Ali, and the others
had been forced to flee from Mecca to Medina when their relationship with
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126 A History of Iran

the rulers of Mecca deteriorated into open hostility. This situation recurs
again and again in Islamic history—particularly in the history of Shi‘ism.
Mohammad challenged the Meccans’ way of life, calling for more moral and
pious forms of conduct based on the revelation of God’s will in the Qor’an.
The Meccan authorities responded with derision and persecution. The con-
flict between arrogant, worldly, corrupt authority and earnest, pious auster-
ity was established as a cultural model for centuries, down to the Iranian
revolution of 1979, and to the present day.
Shi‘a Muslims believe that Mohammad nominated Ali as his successor, as
caliph, after his death, but that the rightful succession was usurped by oth-
ers. By the time Ali became the fourth caliph, in ad 656, the rulers of Islam
had conquered huge territories, from Egypt to Persia, as we saw in the previ-
ous chapter. This meant great new power for some of the leading families of
the Arab tribes (notably for some members of the Quraysh family, many of
whom had opposed Mohammad himself before Mecca submitted and con-
verted), but also required the Arab conquerors to adopt new patterns of rule
and power relationships.
Many Muslims did not approve of the changes, political deals, and prag-
matic compromises involved. Ali, for example, held himself aloof, maintain-
ing a pious life of austerity and prayer. He became a natural focus for dissent
and was in turn resented by those around the caliph, bringing forth the au-
thority/piety conflict within Islam itself for the first time. When Ali became
caliph, this mutual hostility led to civil war (fitna). Then when Ali tried to
make peace in 661, some of his more radical Kharijite supporters felt be-
trayed and murdered him, whereupon the leader of his former opponents—
Mu’awiya—took power as the first Umayyad caliph. In time, Mu’awiya died
and was succeeded by his son—the caliph Yazid that was Hosein’s enemy at
the time of Karbala in 680.
Hosein’s rebellion in defiance of Yazid’s authority was, as Shi‘a believe, a
bid to purify Islam and return it to its original principles. It drew force from
Hosein’s own blood link to the Prophet, but also from the perceived impiety
of Yazid and his court, where wine drinking was common and some of the
forms of pre-Islamic Byzantine and Persian practices had taken hold. Ho-
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Shi‘ism and the Safavids 127

sein hoped for support from Kufa, but Yazid’s troops got there first and bul-
lied the Kufans into passivity. Some Shi‘a historians believe that Hosein
went to his death at Karbala knowingly and willingly, in the belief that only
by sacrificing himself could he bring about the renewal he desired (another
point at which some have drawn comparisons with Christianity). The fail-
ure of Hosein’s Kufan supporters to help him added a strong sense of guilt
to the Shi‘a memory of Karbala.
After Karbala, the Umayyad dynasty of Yazid and his successors contin-
ued to rule at the head of Islam, and the conquest of new territory contin-
ued. To give an idea of the sense of shame and grievance felt by the Shi‘a, one
might try to imagine how Christians would have felt if the leadership of the
church after the death of Christ had fallen to Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate,
and their successors. The Shi‘a saw themselves as the underdogs, the dispos-
sessed, those always betrayed and humiliated by the powerful and the un-
righteous (notwithstanding that powerful Shi‘a dynasties arose later,
dominating extensive territories). A deep inclination to sympathy and com-
passion for the oppressed—and a tendency to see them as naturally more
righteous than the rich and powerful—has persisted in popular Shi‘ism
right through to the present day. The early Shi‘a regarded the Umayyad
caliphs as illegitimate usurpers and hoped for a revolt that would bring to
power the descendants of Mohammad, Ali, and Hosein. These descendants
were the Shi‘a Emams, the sidelined but legitimate leaders of Islam, an alter-
native line of descent to rival that of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs. Shi‘a
Muslims saw themselves as a more or less persecuted minority within states
run by and for Sunni Muslims.
Despite the schism, in the early centuries there was a fairly free inter-
change of ideas, a considerable pluralism of belief, and considerable diversity
of opinion among the Alids or Shi‘a themselves. Overall, Shi‘a theology and
law tended to be looser than in Sunni Islam, more open to the application of
reason in theology, more inclined to a free will position than a determinist
one, and more open to some of the more heterodox ideas circulating in the
Islamic world. This was partly the result of a broader hadith tradition,
which included the sayings and doings of the Shi‘a Emams. Shi‘a theology
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128 A History of Iran

also differed because it addressed problems that were specific to the Shi‘a,
such as conduct under persecution.
The sixth Shi‘a Emam, Ja‘far al-Sadiq, developed a strategy for the eva-
sion of persecution that was to prove controversial. The doctrine of taqiyeh,
or dissimulation, permitted Shi‘a Muslims to deny their faith if necessary to
avoid persecution—a special dispensation that has striking similarities
with the doctrine of “mental reservation” granted for similar reasons by the
Catholic church in the period of the Counter-Reformation, and associated
with the Jesuits (though it originated before their time). Just as the Jesuits
acquired a reputation for deviousness and terminological trickery among
Protestants (whence in English we have the adjective “Jesuitical”), so the
doctrine of taqiyeh earned the Shi‘a a similar reputation among some
Sunni Muslims.
Some commentators argue that the doctrines of Ja‘far al-Sadiq reflected a
period of Shi‘a quietism—a retreat from politics, from confrontation, and
from efforts to overturn the caliphate. This quietism, with its disposition to
modesty and unpretentious virtue, was one thread of Shi‘ism in the follow-
ing centuries (and still is). But there were Shi‘a movements that emphati-
cally did not follow this pattern, including several major Shi‘a revolts in
Ja‘far’s lifetime—the significant Shi‘a participation in the revolt of Abu Mus-
lim that founded the Abbasid caliphate, for example. After Ja‘far al-Sadiq’s
death (in 765) there was a further schism. One group of Shi‘a supported
Ja‘far’s son Musa, while another group acclaimed his other son Ismail as the
seventh Emam, giving rise to the Ismaili or “Sevener” branch of Shi‘ism es-
poused by the later Fatimid rulers of Egypt. The Ismaili sect also spawned
the notorious movement known as the Assassins, a shadowy organization
whose doings were much distorted by Western chroniclers. The Assassins
established themselves as a power in the Alborz mountains in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, and they were especially important in the period
just before and after the Mongol invasions of the 1220s.
In the ninth century a further period of confusion followed the death of
the eleventh Emam (it was the dome of the shrine of the eleventh Emam, at
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Shi‘ism and the Safavids 129

Samarra in Iraq, that was blown up by Sunni extremists in February 2006,

precipitating a new phase of serious Sunni/Shi‘a intercommunal violence)
because it seemed he had no living heir. The main, non-Ismaili strand of
Shi‘ism divided into many different sects with different theological solu-
tions to this problem. Eventually the faith coalesced again around the ex-
planation that the eleventh Emam had had an heir, a son, but that this boy
had been concealed or “occluded” shortly after the death of his father, in or-
der to avoid persecution. At the right time, a time of chaos and crisis, this
hidden twelfth Emam would reappear to reestablish the righteous rule of
God on earth. The parallels with the Christian doctrine of the apocalypse
and the second coming of Christ are obvious (in fact, many Shi‘a believe that
Jesus will accompany the Hidden Emam on his return). But the doctrine
also compares with the Zoroastrian belief in a Messiah to come—the
Saoshyant.
This development added a further, messianic, millenarian element to
Shi‘ism. But it also added a new instability, a self doubt, a kind of permanent
question mark to the problem of the relation of Shi‘a Muslims to both secu-
lar and religious authority. If the Emam was the only legitimate authority,
then what of a world without the active presence of the Emam? Shi‘ism al-
ready had a problem with temporal power, but now it had a further problem
about authority within Shi‘ism itself.
The Hidden Emam was the twelfth and last in succession to Ali, and
those who awaited his return were called Twelver Shi‘as. The largest Shi‘a
community, the Twelver Shi‘as, were a scattered sect, perhaps better re-
garded as a tendency, with elements in southern Mesopotamia, in central
Iran around Qom, in northeastern Iran and Central Asia, in Lebanon, along
the southern shore of the Persian Gulf, and elsewhere (today there are Shi‘a
in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India also). But after a phase of powerful Is-
maili and other Shi‘a dynasties like the Fatimids, Buyids, Qarmatians, and
others from the tenth century, Sunni Muslim rulers predominated. Follow-
ing the Mongol invasions the staunchly orthodox Sunni Ottomans rose in-
exorably to control the western part of the Islamic world.
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130 A History of Iran

The Safavids
By the end of the fifteenth century a militant brotherhood from northwest
Iran and eastern Anatolia, made up of Turkic horsemen and based initially
at Ardebil, had grown to military and political importance, and had begun
to look to expansion on a grander scale. Eastern Anatolia and Azerbaijan at
this time contained many such brotherhoods, more or less militant, more or
less exaggerated or extreme (ghuluww) in their beliefs (as perceived by their
neighbors), often incorporating elements of Sufism, millenarianism,
Shi‘ism, and saint-worship. The beliefs of these brotherhoods have been
traced back to pre-Islamic, Mazdaean roots, through the Khorramites of the
eighth and ninth centuries.3 They attracted the flotsam and jetsam of war-
rior society after the destruction and dislocation of the Mongol and
Timurid invasions—the dispossessed, the fugitives, the opponents of pow-
erful tribal chiefs, and others. They created an alternative center of power,
comparable in that way to the rebel sarbedari in Khorasan under the Mon-
gol Il-Khans. Further west, in the fourteenth century, a not dissimilar group
of Turkish warriors had established the beginnings of the Ottoman Empire
through the prestige of successful fighting against the Byzantines.
The brotherhood in Ardebil were the Safavids, named after one of their
early leaders, Shaykh Safi (1252–1334), a Sunni and a Sufi, who had
preached a purified and restored Islam and a new religious order on earth. It
is possible that he was of Kurdish descent. The early history of the Safavids
is an uncertain and complex subject, but it seems his successor Sadr al-Din
(1334–1391) organized the movement and created a hierarchy and the
arrangements for it to own property. This turned it from a loose association
into a more disciplined organization, one that started to create a wider net-
work of tribal alliances through favors and marriages. Under the later
Safavid shaykhs new groupings or tribes (oymaq) coalesced, held together by
these alliances, and by religious fervor4 (in which devotion to the spiritual
and military example of the Emam Ali was also an element). Under the
leadership of Shaykh Junayd (1447–1460), the Safavids and their followers
allied themselves with the Aq-Qoyunlu (White Sheep Turks, referred to in
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Shi‘ism and the Safavids 131

the preceding chapter), then the dominant power in the ancient territories
of Iran. The Safavids made successful raids into Christian Georgian terri-
tory and developed into a significant military force, later fighting other local
Muslim tribal groups.
After the account of Sufism and Sufi poetry in the previous chapter, the
appearance of fervently warlike Sufis, intent on conquest, might be hard to
reconcile. But Sufism was an extensive, diverse, and multifaceted phenome-
non, and the school of love was only one manifestation of it. Some Sufi
shaykhs were learned hermits, wedded to poverty and contemplation. But
others were less contemplative and more proselytizing, more ghuluww (ex-
treme), more inclined to the realization of divine purposes in the world
through worldly acts, and more ambivalent about violence. The obedience of
the Sufi postulant to his Sufi Master (pir) was an institution common to
most Sufi brotherhoods, but it had an obvious military value in the more
militant ones—like, for example, the Safavids. The military strength of the
Safavids lay in the fighting prowess of the Turkic warriors they led, known
collectively as the Qezelbash, after the red hats they wore (Qezelbash means
“red heads”). Some of the Qezelbash went into battle on horseback without
armor, believing that their faith made them invulnerable. The Sufism of
most of the Qezelbash would have been unsophisticated, centering on some
group rituals and a collective mutual loyalty—just as their Shi‘ism may ini-
tially have amounted to little more than a reverence for Ali as the archetype
of a holy warrior. But it created a powerful group cohesion—asabiyah.
It is uncertain just when the Safavids turned Shi‘a; in the religious context
of that time and place, the question is somewhat artificial. Shi‘a notions were
just one part of an eclectic mix. By the end of the fifteenth century a new
Safavid leader, Esma‘il, was able to expand Safavid influence at the expense of
the Aq-Qoyunlu, who had been weakened by disputes over the dynastic suc-
cession. Esma‘il was himself the grandson of Uzun Hasan, the great Aq-
Qoyunlu chief of the 1460s and 1470s, and may have emulated some of his
grandfather’s charismatic and messianic leadership style. In 1501 Esma‘il and
his Qezelbash followers conquered Tabriz (the old Seljuk capital) in north-
western Iran, and Esma‘il declared himself shah. He was only fourteen years
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132 A History of Iran

old. A contemporary Italian visitor described him as fair and handsome, not
very tall, stout and strong with broad shoulders and reddish hair. He had
long moustaches (a Qezelbash characteristic, prominent in many contempo-
rary illustrations), was left-handed, and was skilled with the bow.5
At the time of his conquest of Tabriz, Esma‘il proclaimed Twelver
Shi‘ism as the new religion of his territories. Esma‘il’s Shi‘ism took an ex-
treme form, which required the faithful to curse the memory of the first
three caliphs that had preceded Ali. This was very offensive to Sunni Mus-
lims, who venerated those caliphs, along with Ali, as the Rashidun or righ-
teous caliphs. Esma‘il’s demand intensified the division between the Safavids
and their enemies, especially the staunchly Sunni Ottomans to the west. Re-
cent scholarship suggests that even if there was a pro-Shi‘a tendency among
the Qezelbash earlier, Esma‘il’s declaration of Shi‘ism in 1501 was a deliber-
ate political act.
Within a further ten years Esma‘il conquered the rest of Iran and all the
territories of the old Sassanid Empire, including Mesopotamia and the old
Abbasid capital of Baghdad. He defeated the remnants of the Aq-Qoyunlu,
as well as the Uzbeks in the northeast and various rebels. Two followers of
one rebel leader were captured in 1504, taken to Isfahan, and roasted on
spits as kebabs. Esma‘il ordered his companions to eat the kebab to show
their loyalty (this is not the only example of cannibalism as a kind of ex-
treme fetish among the Qezelbash).6
Esma‘il attempted to consolidate his control by asserting Shi‘ism
throughout his new domains (though the conventional view that this was
achieved in a short time and that the import of Shi‘a scholars from outside
Iran was significant in the process has been put into doubt7). He also did his
best to suppress rival Sufi orders. It is important to stress that although
there had been strong Shi‘a elements in Iran for centuries before 1501, and
important Shi‘a shrines like Qom and Mashhad, Iran had been predomi-
nantly Sunni, like most of the rest of the Islamic world. The center of
Shi‘ism had been the shrine cities of southern Iraq.8
Esma‘il wrote some poetry (mostly in the Turkic dialect of Azerbaijan,
which became the language of the Safavid court), and it is likely that his fol-
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Shi‘ism and the Safavids 133

lowers recited and sang his compositions as well as other religious songs.
The following poem of Esma‘il’s gives a flavor of the religious intensity and
militant confidence of the Qezelbash:

My name is Shah Esma‘il.

I am on God’s side: I am the leader of these warriors.
My mother is Fatima, my father Ali:
I too am one of the twelve Emams.
I took back my father’s blood from Yazid.
Know for certain that I am the true coin of Haydar [i.e., Ali]
Ever-living Khezr, Jesus son of Mary
I am the Alexander of the people of this age9

In addition to these great figures of the past, Esma‘il identified himself

also with Abu Muslim, who had led the revolt that had overturned the rule
of the Umayyads in 750 and established the Abbasid caliphate.
But Esma‘il’s hopes of westward expansion, aiming to take advantage of
the Shi‘a orientation of many more Turkic tribes in eastern Anatolia, were
destroyed when the élan of the Qezelbash was blown away by Ottoman can-
non at the Battle of Chaldiran, northwest of Tabriz, in 1514. A legend says
that Esma‘il vented his frustration by slashing at a cannon with his sword,
leaving a deep gash in the barrel.
After this defeat Esma‘il could no longer sustain the loyalty of the Qezel-
bash at its previous high pitch, nor their belief in his divine mission. He
went into mourning and took to drink. Wars between the Sunni Ottomans
and the Shi‘a Safavids continued for many years, made more bitter by the re-
ligious schism. Tabriz, Baghdad, and the shrine towns of Iraq changed
hands several times. Shi‘a were persecuted and killed within the Ottoman
territories, particularly in eastern Anatolia where they were regarded as ac-
tual or potential traitors. The Safavids turned Iran into the predominantly
Shi‘a state it is today, and there were spasmodic episodes of persecution
there too, especially of Zoroastrians, Christians, and Jews—despite the os-
tensible protected status of at least the latter two groups as “People of the
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134 A History of Iran

Book.” One could make a parallel with the way that religious persecution in-
tensified either side of the Roman/Persian border in the fourth century ad,
in the reign of Shapur II, after Constantine made Christianity the state reli-
gion of the Roman Empire.
The Safavid monarchs also turned against the Sufis, despite the Safavids’
Sufi heritage. The Sufis were persecuted to the point that the only surviving
Sufi order was the Safavid one, and the others disappeared or went under-
ground. In the long term, the main beneficiary of this were the Shi‘a ulema.
This was important because the Sufis had previously had a dominant or almost
dominant position in the religious life of Iran, especially in the countryside.
The empire established by Esma‘il also created a series of problems for it-
self. Prime among these was the unruly militancy of the Qezelbash, the sus-
picion between Turks and Tajiks (the latter being a disparaging Turkic term
for a Persian), and the division between the Sufi-inclined, eclectic Qezelbash
and the shari‘a tradition of the urban Shi‘a ulema. Gradually all of these were
resolved in favor of the Persians and the ulema, as Ibn Khaldun would have
predicted. Esma‘il’s successor, Tahmasp (r. 1524–1576), lived through sev-
eral years of civil war as a minor, losing territory over his reign to both the
Ottomans in the west (including Baghdad in 1534) and to the Uzbeks in the
east. He moved the capital from Tabriz to Qazvin, making it more secure,
but after his death there was civil war again, and a troubled period that saw
two shahs in succession—before Abbas, cleverly manipulating alliances with
chosen Qezelbash tribes, took the throne in 1587.

Abbas the Great

Abbas’s achievements as shah ranged from military success to institutional
reform to the building of spectacular architectural monuments—for all of
which he is usually referred to as Abbas the Great. He was a talented admin-
istrator and military leader, and a ruthless autocrat. His reign was the out-
standing creative period of the Safavid era. But the civil wars and troubles of
his childhood (when many of his relatives were murdered) left him with a
dark twist of suspicion and brutality at the center of his personality.
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Shi‘ism and the Safavids 135

Most of Abbas’s innovations and reforms centered on the military. He de-

liberately sidelined the Qezelbash tribes, establishing instead the core of a
new standing army based in the new capital, Isfahan. The new army was
largely organized around the introduction—on a significant scale for the first
time—of gunpowder weapons, including up-to-date cannon and a corps of
musketeers. Many features of it echoed Ottoman practice—the musketeers
were designed to be the equals of the redoubtable Ottoman janissaries.
Troops were recruited from among the Qezelbash and from the Persian pop-
ulation of the towns and villages. But Georgians, Armenians, and others were
also brought to Isfahan for the army in large numbers—at least nominally as
slaves, or ghulams—and the loyalty of such soldiers, far from home and in a
more or less alien environment, wholly dependent on the shah, was much
more reliable. Many Georgian and Armenian ghulams also served as com-
manders, bureaucrats, and regional governors. But despite the improvements,
when the shah went to war the central core of the army was augmented by
provincial Qezelbash troops, who were usually in a majority in the field.10
As with any pre-industrial state, policy on land and taxation was closely
tied to military necessities. The Qezelbash tribal leaders lost out here, too.
Abbas took over many of the lands they had previously enjoyed and either
gave them over to be administered centrally by his bureaucrats or distrib-
uted them as tuyul—lands apportioned not to individuals but to state of-
fices, from which office holders drew an income as long as they held the
office. Usually the income was only a proportion of the total yield of the land
holding. The idea was to maximize the loyalty of the office holders to the
state and to minimize the likelihood that land would be permanently alien-
ated away from the crown to ambitious magnates. State revenue was also
boosted by the tightening of the government’s grip on trade, especially the
silk trade, based on silk production in Gilan. Most Persian trade in this
period went east, to India, but some silk was exported west to Europe, espe-
cially by Armenian merchants. To the same end, Abbas used the English
East India Company (that acquired the right to trade in Persia in 1616) to
take back control of the Strait of Hormuz from the Portuguese, and to
reestablish the Persian presence in the Persian Gulf.11
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136 A History of Iran

A weaker monarch would not have lasted long with the Qezelbash if he
had attempted these reforms. But Abbas cunningly played the tribes against
one another, and his success in war gave him huge prestige, making almost
everything possible. With his new army he defeated the Uzbeks in the east—
restoring the border on the Oxus river—and the Ottomans in the west. He
took Baghdad twice. To consolidate his victories, especially in the northeast,
he sent large numbers of Kurds, along with Qezelbash tribesmen like the
Qajars and Afshars, to serve as protectors of the new borders. This resettle-
ment policy served also to reinforce his authority over the tribes, while
weakening their independent power by fragmenting them. He moved
provincial governors from post to new post regularly to prevent any of them
from creating regional power bases for themselves. He also resettled many
Armenians from the northwest to a suburb south of Isfahan, New Julfa,
where Christian Armenians and their bishop still live today.
The new capital, Isfahan, had been a significant place even in the time of
the Sassanids, containing important monuments and mosques from later
periods. But today it stands as perhaps the most splendid and impressive
gallery of Islamic architecture in the world, and it is substantially a creation
of the Safavid period. The central structures, the soaring blue iwans of the
shah mosque, the beautiful Allahvardi Khan bridge, the Ali Qapu and Chehel
Sotoun palaces, the Shaykh Lotfallah mosque, and the great Meidan-e
Shah—all were built or at least begun in the time of Shah Abbas, though
others were added later. The buildings assert Safavid power and prestige and
their identification with Shi‘a Islam, resulting in a magnificence that has
rarely been surpassed.
One of Abbas’s great successes was simply surviving and ruling long
enough for his various enterprises to bear fruit. But in the process he created
a problem—the succession. Succession was a common difficulty for many
monarchs. In Europe, the problem was that every so often a ruler could not
produce a son. This could create all sorts of difficulties—attempts at divorce
(Henry VIII, for example), attempts to secure recognition for the succession
of a daughter or more distant relative, disputes over succession resulting in
war. In the Islamic world, the problem was different. Polygamy meant that
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Shi‘ism and the Safavids 137

kings did not normally have a problem producing a son, but they might, on
the contrary, have too many sons. This could mean fierce fighting among po-
tential heirs and their supporters when the father died. In the Ottoman Em-
pire such battles were institutionalized—rival sons who had served their
father as provincial governors would, on hearing of his death, race for the
capital to claim the throne. The winner would get the support of the janis-
saries, and would then have the other sons put to death. Later, the Ot-
tomans adopted a more dignified arrangement, keeping the possible heirs in
the Sultan’s harem palace until their father died. But this meant they would
have little understanding of or aptitude for government, and the new prac-
tice helped to increase the power of the chief minister, the vizier, so that the
vizier ruled effectively as viceroy. It was a conundrum.
Many fathers have disagreements and clashes with their sons, and history is
full of feuds between kings and their crown princes. Abbas was no exception;
he had come to power himself by deposing his father. Following the Ottoman
precedent again, he imprisoned his sons in the harem for fear that they would
attempt to dethrone him. But he still feared that they might plot against him,
so he had them blinded, and he had one of them killed. Eventually, he was suc-
ceeded by one of his grandsons. The unhappy practice of keeping royal heirs
in the harem was kept up thereafter by the Safavid monarchs.
Although Abbas showed reverence for the shrines of his Sufi ancestors in
Ardebil, his deliberate weakening of the Qezelbash was matched, after signs
of opposition from the Nuqtavi Sufis, by executions and other punishments
that broke them too. Abbas favored instead the ulema and the endowments
(awqaf) that supported them—especially in the shrine cities of Mashhad and
Qom. On one occasion he spent twenty-eight days walking as a pilgrim
across the desert from Isfahan to Mashhad—to show his devotion and to set
an example. Since the continuing hostilities with the Ottomans made access
to the shrines of southern Iraq difficult and uncertain, the shah’s example
helped to swing ordinary Persian Shi‘as toward the Persian shrine cities.
More endowments followed the pilgrims, and the grateful ulema aligned
themselves ever more closely with the Safavid regime. These developments
were also significant for the future. Abbas had been astute in his construction
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138 A History of Iran

of a governmental system that protected state revenue, and his was more
successful than most previous dynasties had been. But over the century that
followed, more and more land was given over to religious endowments,
sometimes merely as a kind of tax dodge, since religious property was ex-
empt from tax.12
Under Shah Abbas the Safavid dynasty achieved a more sophisticated,
more powerful, and more enduring governmental system than the tradi-
tional lands of Iran had seen for many centuries.13 The Safavid state, its ad-
ministration, and its institutionalizing of Shi‘ism set the parameters for the
modern shape of Iran. In its material culture—in metalwork, textiles, carpet
making, miniature painting, ceramics, and above all in its architecture—the
period was one of surpassing creativity in the making of beautiful things.
The dominance of Shi‘ism and the Shi‘a ulema was also accompanied by a
period of creativity in Shi‘a thought—notably among the thinkers who have
been called the School of Isfahan (Mir Damad, Mir Fendereski, and Shaykh
Baha’i), and the religious philosophy of the great Molla Sadra.
Molla Sadra was born in Shiraz in 1571 or 1572. He studied in Qazvin
and Isfahan as a young man, being interested in philosophy and the usual re-
ligious studies as well as Sufism. He was taught by two great thinkers of the
age, Mir Damad and Shaykh Baha’i, and spent some time living near Qom
and traveling before finally settling as a teacher in Shiraz again. His ideas
(most notably expressed in the book known as al-Afsar al-arba’a—Four Jour-
neys) drew upon the philosophy of Avicenna and Neoplatonism, but also on
traditional Shi‘a thought and on the Sufism of Sohravardi (Illumination-
ism), and Ibn Arabi. Molla Sadra’s thought was controversial at the time for
its leaning toward mysticism, which the ulema had traditionally opposed.
But in explaining a way that philosophical rationalism and personal mystical
insight should be combined in a program of individual reflection and study,14
Molla Sadra was able to domesticate mysticism and, calling it erfan, make it
acceptable to the madreseh tradition.15 His thinking has been central in Is-
lamic philosophy in the centuries since his time.
Persian cultural influence in the eastern part of the Islamic world was still
strong, and it was in these centuries that it flowered outside Persia with the
greatest brilliance—in Ottoman Turkey (where Persian was used for diplo-
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Shi‘ism and the Safavids 139

matic correspondence, and Turkish poetry followed Persian forms), in the

Khanates of Central Asia, and above all in Moghul India, where Persian was
the language of the court and a whole new Persianate culture of poetry, mu-
sic, and religious thought flourished. Some have called the poetry of this
period Safavid poetry; others, reflecting the fact that much of it, even if writ-
ten in Persian, was composed in India, have labelled it the Indian period.
Opinion has also divided over its quality; the great Iranian critic Bahar dis-
liked it, and the general view from the mid-nineteenth century was nega-
tive—the poetry was held to have been insipid, making use of rather stale
imagery and lacking in real insight. To a degree, this view reflected the more
favorable judgment of the same critics on the movement of poetry that sup-
planted the Safavid style from the 1760s onward (in Persia, though not else-
where), and others have found more merit in the Safavid poets.
Whatever the judgments of taste, it is nonetheless true that there was a
Persianate literary culture at this time that maintained itself from Istanbul
to Delhi and Samarkand. This in turn had a strong impact on contemporary
and later poetic compositions in Turkish and Urdu, reflecting the wider in-
tellectual, religious, and court influences. But in some ways this Persianate
culture was weakest in the Persian capital, where the court language was
Turkic and mullahs tended to be more in favor than poets.16 Many poets and
other Persians emigrated to the fabulously wealthy Moghul court.
As a consequence of political instability and the existence of competing
polities within the cultural space of Persianate influence, there had been by
accident conditions in Persia in previous centuries that permitted consider-
able (albeit erratic) pluralism of religion and relative freedom of thought.
Over the period of strong Safavid rule, the central territorial core of the Ira-
nian plateau was kept safe from invasion, which after the trauma of the pre-
ceding centuries must have seemed an invaluable blessing. But some
previous freedoms wilted and narrowed.
The Shi‘ism of the Safavids and the ulema under their rule had from the
beginning more than a streak of extremism and intolerance within it, and this
tendency was intensified by the religious conflict with the Ottomans. The
Safavids from the outset tended to be more earnestly religious than many
previous Sunni rulers had been. This is a delicate subject, but it is important
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140 A History of Iran

to look at it squarely. The Sufis were increasingly out of favor, and intellec-
tual life was channeled into the madresehs. There were always hangers-on
and pseudo-mullahs who could attract a following among the luti (unruly
youths) of the towns by being more extreme than their more reflective, edu-
cated rivals; and the perceived history of persecution suffered by the Shi‘a
did not always prompt a sensitivity to the vulnerability of other minorities
once the Shi‘a became the dominant sect. Notions of the religious impurity
(najes) of unbelievers, especially Jews, contributed to a general worsening in
the condition of minorities, and after 1642 there was a particularly grim
period of persecution and forced conversions. Orders were issued that Jews
should wear distinguishing red patches on their clothing to identify them-
selves, that their word at law was near worthless, that they must not wear
matching shoes, fine clothes, or waist sashes, that they must not walk in the
middle of the street or walk past a Muslim, that they must not enter a shop
and touch things, that their weddings must be held in secret, that if they
were cursed by a Muslim they must stay silent, and so on.17 Many of these
would-be rules (running directly contrary to the spirit of proper tolerance
accorded to People of the Book in Islam, and reminiscent of similar ugly rul-
ings imposed in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages and at other times)
probably reflect the aspirations of a few extremist mullahs rather than the
reality as lived. Conditions would have varied greatly from town to town and
changed over time, but they were still indicative of the attitudes of some and
appeared to legitimize the actions of others. As authority figures in villages
and towns, humane, educated mullahs were often the most important pro-
tectors of the Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians.18 But other, lesser mullahs
frequently agitated against these vulnerable groups.
Some have suggested that even among the ulema the close relationship
between the Safavid state and the Shi‘a clergy was not a healthy phenome-
non. The over-close relationship led some mullahs to overlook the strong
distrust of politics, kingship, and secular authority that is deeply entrenched
in Shi‘ism (and is perhaps one of its most attractive characteristics) in their
scramble for the good things that the Safavid shahs had on offer—appoint-
ments, endowments, and a chance to wield some political authority.19 As is
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Shi‘ism and the Safavids 141

often the case with unchecked processes that involve greed, this one brought
some of the senior Shi‘a clergy to shipwreck at the end of the Safavid period.
After the death of Abbas the Great in 1629, the Safavid dynasty endured
for almost a century. But except for an interlude in the reign of Shah Abbas II
(1642–1666) it was a period of stagnation. Baghdad was lost to the Ot-
tomans again in 1638, and the Treaty of Zohab in 1639 fixed the Ottoman/
Persian boundary in its present-day position between Iran and Iraq. Abbas
II took Kandahar from the Moghuls in 1648, but thereafter there was peace
in the east also.
Militarily, the Safavid state probably reached its apogee under Shah Abbas
the Great and Abbas II. But despite its classification with Ottoman Turkey
and Moghul India as one of the Gunpowder Empires (by Marshall G. S.
Hodgson), there is good reason to judge that the practices and structures of
the Safavid Empire were transformed less by the introduction of gunpowder
weapons than those other empires were. Cannon and muskets were present
in Persian armies, but as add-ons to previous patterns of warfare rather than
elements transforming the conduct of war, as they were elsewhere. The
mounted tradition of Persian lance-and-bow warfare, harking back culturally
to Ferdowsi, was resistant to the introduction of awkward and noisy firearms.
Their cavalry usually outclassed that of their enemies, but Persians did not
take to heavy cannon and the greater technical demands of siege warfare as
the Ottomans and Moghuls did. The great distances, lack of navigable rivers,
rugged terrain, and poor roads of the Iranian plateau did not favor the trans-
port of heavy cannon. Most Iranian cities were either unwalled or were pro-
tected by crumbling walls that were centuries old—this at a time when huge,
sophisticated, and highly expensive fortifications were being constructed in
Europe and elsewhere to deal with the challenge of heavy cannon. Persia’s
military revolution was left incomplete.20
Alcohol seems to have played a significant part in the poor showing of the
later Safavid monarchs. From the time of Shah Esma‘il and before, drinking
sessions had been a part of the group rituals of the Qezelbash, building
probably on the ancient practices of the Mongols and the Turkic tribes in
Central Asia, but also on ghuluww Sufi practice and the Persian tradition of
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142 A History of Iran

razm o bazm—fighting and feasting. There is a story that Esma‘il drank

wine in a boat on the Tigris while watching the execution of his defeated
foes after his conquest of Baghdad in 1508,21 and his drinking accelerated af-
ter his defeat at the Battle of Chaldiran. Some accounts even suggest that al-
cohol was instrumental in his early death in 1524. Within the wider Islamic
culture that was hostile to alcohol, it seems that in court circles wine had all
the added allure of the forbidden. One could draw a parallel with the way in
which binge drinking is a feature of British and other traditionally Protes-
tant societies whose religious authorities tended in the past to frown on al-
cohol consumption. Shah Tahmasp appears to have stopped drinking in
1532/1533, maintaining his pledge until his death in 1576, but alcohol was
blamed by contemporaries as a cause or a contributory factor in the deaths
of his successor Shah Esma‘il II, of Shah Safi (reigned 1629–1642), and of
Shah Abbas II (1642–1666).22
Some of this can perhaps be attributed to a moralizing judgment on
rulers who were thought to have failed more generally. For writers who dis-
approved of alcohol, drinking wine was a sufficient explanation for (or at
least a sign of ) incompetence, indolence, or general moral weakness and bad
character. (Shah Abbas I drank too, without damaging his reputation.) But
there is too much evidence for the drinking to be dismissed as the invention
of chroniclers. The reign of Shah Soleiman represents the apotheosis of the
phenomenon.
Soleiman came to the throne in 1666 and reigned for the next twenty-
eight years. A contemporary reported,

He was tall, strong, and active, a little too effeminate for a monarch—with a
Roman nose, very well proportioned to other parts, very large blue eyes and a
middling mouth, a beard dyed black, shaved round and well turned back, even
to his ears. His manner was affable but nevertheless majestic. He had a mas-
culine and agreeable voice, a gentle way of speaking and was so very engaging
that, when you had bowed to him he seemed in some measure to return it by a
courteous inclination of his head, and this he always did smiling.23
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Shi‘ism and the Safavids 143

Soleiman’s reign was for the most part quiet. Some fine mosques and
palaces were built, but one could take those as material symbols of the grow-
ing diversion of economic resources into religious endowments, and of the
blinkered, inward-looking tendency of the monarch and his court. Both of
these were to prove damaging in the long run. Soleiman showed little inter-
est in governing, leaving state business to his officials.
Sometimes he would amuse himself by forcing them (especially the most
pious ones) to drink to the dregs an especially huge goblet of wine (called
the hazar pishah). Sometimes they collapsed and had to be carried out. If
they stayed on their feet, the shah might, for a joke, order them to explain
their views of important matters of government.24
Shah Soleiman himself drank heavily, despite occasional outbreaks of
temperance induced by health worries and religious conscience.25 His plea-
sure-loving insouciance was the natural outcome of his upbringing in the
harem. He had little sense of the world beyond the court and little interest
in it. He merely wanted to continue the lazy life he had enjoyed before, aug-
mented by the luxuries he had formerly been denied. But some contempo-
rary accounts say that when drunk he could turn nasty, that on one occasion
he had his brother blinded, and that at other times he ordered executions.
It is a testament to the strength and sophistication of the Safavid state
and its bureaucracy that it continued to function despite the lack of a strong
monarch. In other Islamic states this situation often permitted the emer-
gence of a vizier or chief minister as the effective ruler. In Isfahan it seems
that the influence of other important office holders (as well as that of
Maryam Begum, the shah’s great aunt, who came to dominate the harem)
was enough to prevent any single personality achieving dominance. But as
time went on the officials acted more and more in their own private and fac-
tional interests, against the interests of their rivals, and less and less in the
interest of the state. Bureaucracies are not of themselves virtuous institu-
tions—they need firm masters and periodic reform to reinforce an ethic of
service if they are not to go wrong. And if the officials see their masters act-
ing irresponsibly, they will imitate their vices.
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144 A History of Iran

The influence of the politically inclined ulema at court strengthened as the

shah’s involvement in business slumped, and one leading cleric, Mohammad
Baqer Majlesi, has been associated with a deliberate policy of targeting mi-
norities for persecution (at least in the case of Hindu Indian merchants) to
appeal to the worst instincts among the people and thereby enhance the pop-
ularity of the regime.26 Persecution was episodic and unpredictable, some-
times concentrating on the Indians or Jews, sometimes on the Armenians,
sometimes on the Sufis, or the Zoroastrians, or Sunni Muslims in the
provinces. In general, minorities—even Jews and Christians, who should
have enjoyed protection as People of the Book—were disadvantaged at law,
subject to everyday humiliations, and vulnerable to the ambitions of rabble-
rousing preachers who might seek greater fame for themselves by inciting ur-
ban mobs against them. The cleric Majlesi’s personal responsibility for a
worsening of the situation from the reign of Shah Soleiman onward has been
disputed (for example, his treatise Lightning Bolts Against the Jews turns out on
examination to be rather more moderate in setting out the provisions of Is-
lamic law on the minorities than its title might suggest27), but he was an influ-
ential figure and was briefly to become dominant in the succeeding reign. His
voluminous writings also included strong blasts against Sunnis and Sufis.
The movement was broader than just Majlesi (whom it may have suited to
appear radical to one constituency and moderate to another), but it is impor-
tant to remember that it represented only one strand of Shi‘ism at the time;
other Shi‘a ulema were critical of Majlesi’s repressive policy.28
As Shah Soleiman’s reign drew to a close, the Safavid regime looked
strong but had been seriously weakened. Its monuments looked splendid,
but the intellectual world of Persia, once distinguished for its tolerance and
vision, was now led by narrower, smaller minds.
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5
The Fall of the
Safavids, Nader Shah,
the Eighteenth-Century
Interregnum, and the Early
Years of the Qajar Dynasty

Morghi didam neshaste bar bareh-e Tus

Dar pish nahade kalleh-e Kay Kavus
Ba kalleh hami goft ke afsus afsus
Ku bang-e jarasha o koja shod naleh-e kus

I saw a bird on the walls of Tus

That had before it the skull of Kay Kavus.
The bird was saying to the skull “Alas, alas”
Where now the warlike bells? And where the moan of the kettledrums?
—attributed to Omar Khayyam

According to a story that was widely repeated, when Shah Soleiman lay dy-
ing in July 1694, he left it undecided which of his sons should succeed him.
Calling his courtiers and officials, he told them—“If you desire ease, elevate

145
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146 A History of Iran

Hosein Mirza. If the glory of your country be the object of your wishes,
raise Abbas Mirza to the throne.”1 Once Soleiman was dead, the eunuch of-
ficials who supervised the harem decided for Hosein because they judged he
would be easier for them to control. Hosein was also the favorite of his great
aunt, Maryam Begum, the dominant personality in the harem, so Hosein
duly became shah.
Such stories present historians with a problem. Their anecdotal quality,
though vivid, does not fit the style of modern historical writing, and even
their wide contemporary currency cannot overcome a reluctance to accept
them at face value. The deathbed speech, the neat characterization of the
two princes, and the cynical choice of the bureaucrats—it is all too pat. But
to dismiss it out of hand would be as wrong as to accept it at face value. It is
more sensible to accept the story as a reflection of the overall nature of moti-
vations and events, even if the actual words reported were never said. The
story reflects the impression of casual negligence, even irresponsible mis-
chief, that we know of Shah Soleiman from other sources. As the conse-
quences will show, it also gives an accurate picture of the character of Shah
Sultan Hosein, and the motivation of his courtiers. It is quite credible that
Shah Soleiman left the succession open and that over-powerful officials
chose the prince they thought would be most malleable.
Initially, Shah Sultan Hosein appeared to be as pious and orthodox as
Mohammed Baqer Majlesi, the pre-eminent cleric at court, could have
wished. Under the latter’s influence the bottles from the royal wine cellar
were brought out into the meidan in front of the royal palace and publicly
smashed. Instead of allowing a Sufi the honor of buckling on his sword at
his coronation, as had been traditional (reflecting the Sufi origins of the
Safavid dynasty), the new shah had Majlesi do it instead. Within the year
orders went out for taverns, coffee houses, and brothels to be closed, and for
prostitution, opium, “colorful herbs,” sodomy, public music, dancing, and
gambling to be banned—along with more innocent amusements like kite
flying. Women were to stay at home, to behave modestly, and were forbidden
to mix with men who were not relatives. Islamic dress was to be worn. The
new laws were applied despite the protests of treasury officials, who warned
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 147

that there would be a huge drop in revenue, equivalent to 50 kg of gold per

day, because the state had made so much money from the taxation of prosti-
tution and other forms of entertainment. To make sure the new order was
widely publicized, it was read out in the mosques, and in some it was carved
in stone over the door. A later order stipulated that Majlesi, as Shaykh ol-eslam
(the title given to the senior cleric in Isfahan), should be obeyed by all
viziers, governors, and other secular officials across the empire. Anyone who
broke the rules, or had done so in the past, was to be punished.2 It was a kind
of Islamic revolution.
Yet within a few months of his taking the throne, Shah Sultan Hosein
was drinking as much as his father had, and his great aunt, Maryam Begum
(perhaps affronted among other things at Majlesi’s attack on women’s free-
doms), had reasserted her dominance at court. The Sufis were eclipsed but
not wholly suppressed. The decrees did not achieve temperance at court and
were probably widely flouted, but they contributed to an atmosphere of re-
newed intolerance and repression of minorities. This was to prove especially
damaging in the frontier provinces, where Sunnis were in the majority in
many areas—notably in Baluchistan, Herat, Kandahar, and Shirvan. Such
was Majlesi’s achievement by the time of his death in 1699. Other clerics at
court followed in his spirit thereafter.
Shah Sultan Hosein was a mild-tempered, well-meaning man. He had
no streak of cruelty in his character, and there is no record of his having or-
dered any executions over the period of his reign (which, like that of his fa-
ther, also lasted twenty-eight years). His sequestered upbringing and
indolent nature meant that he disliked being disturbed or bothered with
problems. The indications are that he was what we would call institutional-
ized, and as a result was lacking in confidence with the world outside the
palace or with people he did not know. He enjoyed wine and eating, but
otherwise was pious and humane, putting his energies into a new complex
of gardens and pavilions at Farahabad, southwest of Isfahan. His courtiers
and officials encouraged him to leave state business to them. His other
main interest was sex. His emissaries collected pretty girls from all over his
domains (from any group or religion except the Jews), brought them to
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148 A History of Iran

Isfahan, and delivered them to the shah’s harem for his enjoyment. After a
time, if they became pregnant, they would be taken away again, well fur-
nished with money and presents. Some were married off to prominent no-
bles, so that when male children were born, they became the heirs of those
nobles.3
One could make an argument that the world would have been a better
place if there had been more monarchs like Shah Soleiman and Shah Sultan
Hosein—pacific, passive, interested in little more than building pleasure
pavilions, making garden improvements, drinking, and silken dalliance. But
war and politics, like nature, abhor a vacuum. Persia in 1700 was, as states
go, well placed: it had strong, natural frontiers, and its traditional enemies
were either as passive as itself or distracted by more pressing troubles. The
state of the economy has been debated, but it now seems that what were
once taken as signs of economic decline were in fact signs mainly of the fail-
ure of the state to adapt to economic change.4 The expansion of European
trade to dominance, subordinating and damaging the economies of Asia,
had yet to happen. Persian architects still produced beautiful buildings—
the Madar-e Shah madreseh in Isfahan shows the loveliness of Safavid style
in this last phase. The state administration continued to function despite
the shah’s negligence and was still capable of raising taxation (albeit less than
it should have raised) and powerful armies. But the Safavid state had a soft
center, and the wider world was no less harsh and competitive than in the
days of the Mongols and their successors. The story of the end of the
Safavids is a powerful reminder that the prime concern of a state is always
(or should always be) security—what Machiavelli called mantenere lo stato (to
maintain the state). The rest—the palaces, the sophisticated court, the reli-
gious endowments, the parks and gardens, the fine clothes, paintings, jew-
elry, and so on, however delightful—were mere froth.

The Afghan Revolt

The prime agent of the Safavid dynasty’s destruction was an Afghan of the
Ghilzai tribe, from Kandahar, Mir Veis. He was wealthy and well connected
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 149

and also had a reputation for generosity to the poor and to his friends; this
made him popular among the Afghans, who valued rugged austerity and
piety and disliked ostentation. The oppressive Safavid governor of Kanda-
har—doubly unpopular because he was a Georgian asserting Shi‘a su-
premacy—worried that Mir Veis had enough influence to organize a
rebellion and made the mistake of sending him to Isfahan. There Mir Veis
soon summed up the debility of the regime.
Like most Pashtun-speaking Afghans, Mir Veis was a Sunni Muslim.
While in Isfahan he secured permission from the shah to go on the hajj to
Mecca, where he obtained a fatwa legitimizing a revolt against Safavid rule.
After his return to Kandahar (he charmed Shah Sultan Hosein and easily
convinced him of his loyalty) Mir Veis coordinated a successful revolt and
killed the Georgian governor in 1709. A succession of armies were sent from
Isfahan to crush the rebels, and there is evidence that at least one vizier
made serious attempts to galvanize the state—among other things reestab-
lishing the artillery corps that had ceased to exist in the time of Shah
Soleiman. But the expeditions failed, and their failure encouraged the Ab-
dali Afghans of Herat to revolt, too. Maneuvers by jealous courtiers in Isfa-
han impeded active officials or removed them from office, and the shah
failed to intervene. As the prestige of the state wilted, Safavid subjects in
other territories revolted or seceded—in Baluchistan, Khorasan, Shirvan,
and the island of Bahrain. Maryam Begum tried to prod the shah into more
determined action to restore order, but little was done and (mercifully for
her) she seems to have been dead by 1721.
Mir Veis died in 1715, but in 1719 his young son, Mahmud, raided onto
the Iranian plateau as far as Kerman, capturing the city and doing terrible
damage there. Encouraged by this success, Mahmud returned in 1721 with
an army of Afghans, Baluchis, and other adventurers. Mahmud was an un-
stable character, and paradoxically he might not have succeeded but for his
instability. He encountered difficulties at Kerman and Yazd, but rather than
turning back as a more cautious leader might have done, he boldly pressed
on toward the Safavid capital. The Safavid vizier mobilized an army against
the Afghans that probably outnumbered them by more than two to one, but
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150 A History of Iran

on the day of battle at Golnabad on March 8, 1722, the Persian commanders

were divided by court faction and failed to support one another in the fight-
ing. Shah Sultan Hosein stayed behind in Isfahan (something Shah Abbas
would never have done). His Georgian guards were surrounded on the bat-
tlefield and massacred while the vizier’s troops stood by and watched. The
Persian cannon were overrun before they could fire more than a few shots,
and the rest of the Safavid troops fled for the capital.
The Afghans, perhaps barely able to believe their luck, blockaded Isfa-
han—their numbers were insufficient for a successful assault and they had
no heavy artillery to breach the walls. From March to October the capital
endured a terrible siege that slowly starved the inhabitants until they were
eating shoe leather and bark from the trees. There were also reports of can-
nibalism. Opportunities to bring in supplies or to coordinate relieving forces
from outside were missed, but Tahmasp, one of the shah’s sons, escaped, and
began rather ineffectually to collect supporters in the northern part of Per-
sia. Finally, on October 23, the shah rode out of the city on a borrowed horse
to his former pleasure gardens at Farahabad and surrendered the city and
the throne to Mahmud Ghilzai.
After the Afghan occupation of Isfahan, the Ottoman Turks took the op-
portunity to conquer the western provinces of Iran, including Tabriz, Ker-
manshah, and Hamadan (though not without fierce resistance by many of
the inhabitants). Peter the Great of Russia, unwilling to see Ottoman power
in the region expand unopposed, moved south on his last campaign to oc-
cupy the southern coast of the Caspian Sea. With these occupations com-
pleted, and in the absence of any obvious focus for resistance, it looked as
though the Iranian state established by the Safavids in the early sixteenth
century was gone for good. In Isfahan, isolated from the base of his support
in Kandahar and in control of only a relatively small part of the previous
Safavid realm, Mahmud grew increasingly unhinged and paranoid. In Feb-
ruary 1725 he personally massacred almost all the surviving male members
of the Safavid royal family in one of the courts of the palace, ceasing the
slaughter only when the former Shah Sultan Hosein physically intervened.
Shortly afterward Mahmud, by now raving, either died of illness or was
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 151

murdered and was replaced as shah by his cousin Ashraf. Ashraf initially
made promises to protect the abdicated Shah Sultan Hosein but eventually
had him beheaded to forestall an Ottoman attempt to restore him to the
throne.
The 1720s were a miserable decade for many Persians. In the territories
occupied by the Ottomans, some people were initially carried off as slaves (it
was permissible to enslave Shi‘as because the Sunni Ottomans regarded
them as heretics). In the area controlled by the Afghans, Persian townspeo-
ple and peasants were frequently attacked and plundered, and Ashraf issued
an edict ordering that the Persians should be treated the worst of a hierarchy
of groups—worse than Christians, Zoroastrians, or even Jews.5 Fighting
continued between the various occupiers and those who still resisted them,
and the economy was badly disrupted, causing further impoverishment,
hardship, and suffering.

The Slave of Tahmasp

By this time a young warlord called Nader Qoli, from the old Afshar Qezel-
bash tribe, had risen from obscure beginnings through the chaos and disor-
der of the times to become a local power in the province of Khorasan in the
northeast. Contemporaries described him as tall and handsome, with intelli-
gent dark eyes. He was ruthless with his enemies but magnanimous to those
who submitted and capable of charming those he needed to impress. A fine
horseman who loved horses, he was energetic and always happiest in the
saddle. He had a prodigiously loud voice; he was once credited with putting
an army of rebels to flight by the sound of his voice alone—until the rebels
heard him giving orders for the attack, they believed they were only con-
fronting a subordinate.6 The Safavid cause regained some impetus in the au-
tumn of 1726 when this stentorian commander joined forces with Tahmasp
(the son of Shah Sultan Hosein, who had been named shah by his support-
ers and had been chased up and down northern Iran by the Afghans and
Ottomans) and reconquered Mashhad, the capital of Khorasan. In recogni-
tion of his services, Tahmasp gave Nader the name Tahmasp Qoli Khan,
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152 A History of Iran

which means “the slave of Tahmasp.” It was an honor to be given the name of
royalty in this way, but Tahmasp Qoli Khan was to prove an over-mighty
servant. By contrast with Nader, Tahmasp combined the faults of his father
and grandfather—he was an ineffectual, lazy, vindictive alcoholic. The usual
upbringing had taken its usual effect. One of Tahmasp’s courtiers com-
mented that he would never make a success of his reign because he was al-
ways drunk and no one was in a position to correct him.7
After consolidating his position by making a punitive campaign to cow
the Abdali Afghans of Herat, and having established his dominance at Tah-
masp’s court, Nader by the autumn of 1729 was finally ready to attack the
Afghan forces that were occupying Isfahan. An eyewitness account from this
time, from the Greek merchant and traveler Basile Vatatzes, gives a vivid im-
pression of the daily exercises Nader had imposed on the army to prepare
them for battle. We know that he made these routine for his troops
throughout his career, but no other source describes the exercises in such
detail.
Vatatzes wrote that Nader, entering the exercise area on his horse, would
nod in greeting to his officers. He would then halt his horse and sit silently
for some time, examining the assembled troops. Finally, he would turn to the
officers and ask what battle formations or weapons the troops would prac-
tice with that day. Then the exercises would begin:

And they would attack from various positions, and they would do wheels and
counter-wheels, and close up formation, and charges, and disperse formation, and
then close up again on the same spot; and flights; and in these flights they would
make counter-attacks, quickly rallying together the dispersed troops. . . . And they
exercised all sorts of military manoeuvres on horseback, and they would use real
weapons, but with great care so as not to wound their companions.

As well as practicing movement in formation, the horsemen also showed

their skill with individual weapons—lance, sword, shield, and bow. As a tar-
get for their arrows, a glass ball was put at the top of a pole, and the men
would ride toward it at the gallop, and try to hit it. Few could, but when
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 153

Nader performed the exercise he would gallop along, opening and closing
his arms like wings as he handled the bow and the quiver, and hit the target
two or three times in three or four attempts, looking “like an eagle.” The cav-
alry exercises lasted three hours. The infantry also exercised together:

. . . the infantry—I mean those that carried muskets—would get together in

their own units and they would shoot their guns at a target and exercise con-
tinuously. If [Nader] saw an ordinary soldier consistently on top form he
would promote him to be a leader of 100 men or a leader of 50 men. He en-
couraged all the soldiers toward bravery, ability and experience, and in simple
words he himself gave an example of strong character and military virtue.8

Vatatzes’s description dwells on cavalry maneuvers and the display of in-

dividual weapon skills because these were dramatic. But his description of
infantry training and the expenditure of costly powder and ball in exercises
is significant because it shows Nader’s concern to maximize the firepower of
his troops, which was to prove crucial. This passage also makes plain the
care he took with the selection of good officers, and their promotion by
merit. For the army to act quickly, intelligently, and flexibly under his orders,
it was essential to have good officers to transmit them. Three hours a day of
maneuvers, over time, brought Nader’s men to a high standard of control
and discipline, so that on the battlefield they moved and fought almost as
extensions of his own mind. Vatatzes shows the way Nader impressed on
the men what they had to do by personal example—a principle he followed
in battle, too. Training, firepower, discipline, control, and personal example
were part of the key to his success in war. Nader’s transformation of the
army was already well advanced.
By the end of 1729 Nader’s army had defeated the Afghans in three bat-
tles and had retaken Isfahan. Tahmasp was reinstalled in the old capital as
shah. But before Nader agreed to pursue the defeated Afghans, he forced
Tahmasp to concede the right to collect taxes to support the army. The right
to levy taxes enabled Nader to establish a state within the state, based on the
army.
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154 A History of Iran

Nader duly finished off the remnants of the Afghan occupying force. He
went on to throw the Ottoman Turks out of western Persia before turning
rapidly east to conquer Herat. In all these campaigns his modernized forces,
strong in gunpowder weapons, outclassed their opponents and showed
themselves able to overcome the ferocity of the Afghan cavalry charges and
the attacks of the provincial Ottoman troops. But while he was in Herat, he
learned that in his absence Tahmasp had renewed the war with the Ot-
tomans, allowed himself to be defeated, and concluded a humiliating peace
with the Ottomans. Nader issued a manifesto repudiating the treaty, and
marched west. It is striking that he declared himself publicly and sought
popular support for his action—a modern moment that argues against
those who deny the existence of any but local and dynastic loyalties in this
period.
Arriving in Isfahan in the late summer of 1732—and having prepared
what was to come with typical care—Nader fooled Tahmasp into a false
sense of security and got him drunk. He then displayed the Safavid shah in
this disreputable state to the Shi‘a courtiers and army officers. The assem-
bled notables, prompted by Nader, declared Tahmasp unfit to rule, and ele-
vated his infant son Abbas to the throne instead. Nader continued as
generalissimo to this infant, announcing at the coronation his intention to
“throw reins around the necks of the rulers of Kandahar, Bokhara, Delhi,
and Istanbul” on his behalf. Those present may have thought this to be vain
boasting, but events were to prove them wrong.
Nader’s first priority was to attack the Ottomans again and restore the
traditional frontiers of Persia in the west and north. In his first campaign in
Ottoman Iraq he met a setback: a powerful army including some of the best
troops held centrally by the Ottoman state marched east to relieve Baghdad,
led by an experienced commander. This was warfare of a different order to
that Nader had experienced up to that time. Overconfident, he divided his
army outside Baghdad—attempting to prevent supplies getting through to
the besieged city—and suffered a serious defeat. But within a few months,
after replacing lost men and equipment with a ruthless efficiency that caused
much suffering among the hapless peasants and townspeople who had to
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 155

pay for it, Nader renewed the Turkish war, this time defeating the Ottoman
forces near Kirkuk. Moving north, he then inflicted a devastating defeat on a
new Ottoman army near Yerevan. This was in June 1735. A truce was nego-
tiated on the basis of the old frontiers that had existed before 1722, and the
Ottomans withdrew. The Russians—Nader’s allies against the Ottomans—
had already withdrawn from the Persian lands along the Caspian coast, their
regiments having lost many men to disease in the humid climate of Gilan.

Nader Shah
With the exception of Kandahar, Nader had now restored control over all
the traditional territories of Safavid Persia. He decided the time was right to
make himself shah, and he did so by means of an acclamation by all the
great nobles, tribal chiefs, and senior clerics of Persia at an assembly on the
Moghan plain. There was little dissent, but the chief mullah was overheard
speaking privately in favor of the continuation of Safavid rule, and was
strangled. The infant Abbas was deposed, and the rule of the Safavid dy-
nasty at last came to an end. It is noteworthy that despite Nader’s later repu-
tation for tyrannical cruelty, and with the exception of the unfortunate chief
mullah (whose execution carried its own political message), he achieved his
rise to power almost without the use of political violence. He brought about
the deposition of Tahmasp and the coronation at the Moghan not by assas-
sination, but by careful preparation, propaganda, cunning maneuvering, and
the presence of overbearing military force—and above all by the prestige of
his military successes.
Some other significant events occurred at the Moghan. Nader made it a
condition of his acceptance of the throne that the Persian people accepted the
cessation of Shi‘a practices offensive to Sunni Muslims (especially the ritual
cursing of the first three caliphs). This new religious policy served a variety of
purposes. The reorientation toward Sunnism helped to reinforce the loyalty
of the large Sunni contingent in Nader’s army, which he had built up in order
to avoid too great a dependence on the traditionalist Shi‘a element, who
tended to be pro-Safavid. But also the new policy was not aggressively dog-
 O
156

Nader Shah

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0465019205-text_Layout 1 12/29/09 9:41 AM Page 156

Baghdad
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under Nader Shah Muscat Arabian Sea
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 157

matic. Religious minorities were treated with greater tolerance. Nader was
generous to the Armenians, and his reign was regarded later by the Jews as
one of relief from persecution (though minorities suffered as much as any-
one else from his violent oppression and heavy taxation, especially in later
years).9 The religious policy made it easier for Nader to make a grab for the
endowments of Shi‘a mosques and shrines, an important extra source of
cash to pay his troops. Within Persia, Nader sought only to amend religious
practices—not to impose Sunnism wholesale. But outside Persia he pre-
sented himself and the country as converts to Sunnism10—which enabled
Nader to set himself up as a potential rival to the Ottoman sultan for su-
premacy over Islam as a whole, something that would have been impossible
if he and his state had remained orthodox Shi‘a.
The religious policy also served to distinguish Nader’s regime and its
principles from those of the Safavids. He did this in other ways, too, notably
with his policy toward minorities, and by giving his sons governorships
rather than penning them up in the harem. He also showed moderation in
the size of his harem and issued decrees forbidding the abduction of
women. This change was probably directed, at least in part, at pointing up
the contrast between his rule and that of the last Safavids.
Crowned shah, with his western frontiers secure and in undisputed
control of the central lands of Persia, Nader set off eastward to conquer
Kandahar. The exactions to pay for this new campaign caused great suffer-
ing and in many parts of the country brought the economy almost to a
standstill. Nader took Kandahar after a long siege, but he did not stop
there. Using the excuse that the Moghul authorities had given refuge to
Afghan fugitives, Nader crossed the old frontier between the Persian and
Moghul empires, took Kabul, and marched on toward Delhi. North of
Delhi, at Karnal, the Persian army encountered the army of the Moghul
emperor, Mohammad Shah. The Persians were much inferior in number
to the Moghul forces, yet thanks to the better training and firepower of his
soldiers, and rivalry and disunity among the Moghul commanders, Nader
defeated them. He was helped by the fact that the Moghul commanders
were mounted on elephants, which besides proving vulnerable to firearms
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158 A History of Iran

were liable to run wild—to the dismay of their distinguished riders and any-
one who happened to be in their path.
From the battlefield of Karnal, Nader went on to Delhi, where he arrived
in March 1739. Shortly after his arrival there, rioting broke out and some
Persian soldiers were killed. So far from home, and with the wealth of the
Moghul Empire at stake, Nader could not afford to lose control. He ordered
a ruthless massacre in which an estimated thirty thousand people died,
mostly innocent civilians. Prior to this point, Nader had generally (at least
away from the battlefield) achieved his ends without excessive bloodshed.
But after Delhi, he may have decided that his previous scruples had become
redundant.
With a characteristic blend of threat and diplomacy, Nader stripped the
Moghul emperor of a vast treasure of jewels, gold, and silver, and accepted
the gift of all the Moghul territories west of the Indus River. The treasure
was worth as much as perhaps 700 million rupees. To put this sum in some
kind of context, it has been calculated that the total cost to the French gov-
ernment of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), including subsidies paid to
the Austrian government as well as all the costs of the fighting on land and
sea, was about 1.8 billion livres tournois (the standard unit of account in pre-
revolutionary France). This was equivalent to about £90 million sterling at
the time—close to the rough estimate of £87.5 million sterling for the value
of Nader’s haul from Delhi. Some of the jewels he took away—the largest,
most impressive ones, like the Kuh-e Nur, the Darya-ye Nur, and the Taj-e
Mah—had a complex and often bloody history of their own in the following
decades.
Nader did not attempt to annex the Moghul Empire outright. His pur-
pose in conquering Delhi had been to secure the cash necessary to continue
his wars of conquest in the west, for which the wealth of Persia alone had, by
the time of his coronation, begun to prove inadequate.
Nader’s campaigns are a reminder of the centrality of Persia to events in
the region, in ways that have parallels today. A list of some of Nader’s
sieges—Baghdad, Basra, Kirkuk, Mosul, Kandahar, Herat, Kabul—has a
familiar ring to it after the events of the first years of the twenty-first cen-
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 159

tury. It is worth recalling that Persians were not strangers in any of the lands
in which Nader campaigned. Although he and his Safavid predecessors were
of Turkic origin and spoke a Turkic language at court, the cultural influence
of Persian was such that the language of the court and administration in
Delhi and across northern India was Persian, and diplomatic correspon-
dence from the Ottoman court in Istanbul was normally in Persian, too.
Persian hegemony from Delhi to Istanbul would, in some ways, have seemed
natural to many of the inhabitants of the region, echoing as it did the Per-
sian character of earlier empires and the pervasive influence of Persian liter-
ary, religious, and artistic culture.
Nader’s annexation of Moghul territory west of the Indus, removing the
geographical barrier of the Afghan mountains, was one indicator that his
regime, had it endured, might have expanded further into India. Other indi-
cations include his construction of a fleet in the Persian Gulf, which would
have greatly facilitated communications between the different parts of such
an empire, and his adoption of a new currency designed to be interchange-
able with the rupee. If this had happened—especially if the trade route
through to Basra, Baghdad, and beyond had been opened up—and if it had
been managed wisely, Nader could have seen a release of trade and economic
energy comparable to that under the Abbasids a thousand years earlier. But
that was not to happen.
On his return from India, Nader discovered that his son, Reza Qoli, who
had been made viceroy in his absence, had executed the former Safavid
shahs Tahmasp and Abbas. Nader’s displeasure at this was increased by his
dislike of the magnificent entourage Reza Qoli had built up while Nader
had been in India. In response, Nader took away his son’s viceroyship and
humiliated him. From this point, their relationship deteriorated, and Nader
came to believe that Reza Qoli was plotting to supplant him.
From India, Nader made a successful campaign in Turkestan. Then he
went on to subdue the rebellious Lezges of Daghestan, but there he was un-
lucky. The Lezges avoided open battle and carried out a guerrilla war of am-
bush and attacks on supply convoys. Nader’s troops suffered from lack of food,
and Nader himself was troubled by illness, probably liver disease caused origi-
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160 A History of Iran

nally by malaria and exacerbated by heavy drinking. The sickness, which grew
worse after his return from India, was accompanied by great rages that became
more ungovernable as time went on. While he was in Daghestan in the sum-
mer of 1742, he was told that Reza Qoli had instigated an assassination at-
tempt against him. Reza Qoli denied his guilt. But Nader did not believe him
and had him blinded to prevent his ever taking the throne.
Nader’s failure in Daghestan, his illness, and above all his terrible remorse
over the blinding of his son brought about a crisis, a kind of breakdown,
from which he never recovered. Perhaps because of the poverty and humilia-
tions of his childhood, Nader’s family were of central importance to him,
and loyalty within the family had up to that time been unquestioned. It had
been one of the fixed points on which he had constructed his regime. Now
with that foundation given way, Nader’s actions no longer showed his for-
mer energy and drive to succeed, and he underwent a drastic mental and
physical decline. Withdrawing from Daghestan without having subdued the
Lezges tribes, he called new forces together—according to plans laid
months and years before—for another campaign in Ottoman Iraq.
When they gathered, his army numbered some 375,000 men—larger
than the combined forces of Austria and Prussia, the main protagonists in
the European theater of the Seven Years’ War when that conflict began thir-
teen years later.11 This was the most powerful single military force in the
world at that time. It was also, in the long term, an insupportable number of
troops for a state the size of Persia (no Iranian army would reach that size
again until the Iran/Iraq war of 1980–1988). It has been estimated that
whereas there were around thirty million people in the Ottoman territories
in the eighteenth century, and perhaps one hundred fifty million in the
Moghul Empire, Persia’s population was perhaps as low as six million, hav-
ing fallen from nine million before the Afghan revolt. Over the same period
the economy collapsed, as a result of invasion, war, and exactions to pay for
war.12
The army, and the taxation to pay for it, are recurring themes in Nader’s
story. Was this army a nomad host, or a modern military force? This points
to the wider question of whether Nader’s style of rule looked backward or
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 161

forward. It is an extreme mixture. Nader repeatedly compared himself with

Timur, stressing his Turkic origin and Timurid precedents in many of his
public statements. He named his grandson Shahrokh after Timur’s son and
successor. At one point he even removed Timur’s tombstone from Samarkand
for his own mausoleum, only to return it later (unfortunately, it was broken
in half in the process). On several occasions he described himself as the in-
strument of God’s wrath on a sinful people, after the manner of earlier Asi-
atic conquerors, and his brutal conduct of government—particularly after
his return from India—has as much in common with the actions of a no-
mad warlord as with those of a modern statesman.
But he was not in any simple sense a tribal leader, and in many ways he
remained an outsider throughout his life. He was not born into the leader-
ship of the Afshar tribe to which he belonged, and some of his most deter-
mined enemies throughout his career were fellow Afshars. From the
beginning his followers were diverse, including especially Kurds and Jalayir
tribesmen. Later he repudiated his Shi‘a heritage, turned Sunni (at least for
public consumption), and depended most heavily on his Afghan troops.
Like other Persian leaders (as well as Napoleon), he was close to his imme-
diate family and promoted them politically; but in his wider connections he
was an opportunist, and the term Afsharid that is applied to him and his dy-
nasty is misleading. The name Nader means “rarity” or “prodigy,” and both
are appropriate. He was sui generis, a parvenu.
Nader used government cleverly, began an important and thorough re-
form of taxation, and had a strong administrative grip. His religious policy
was novel and tolerant in spirit. One should not overstate it, but some con-
temporaries remarked upon his unusually considerate treatment of women.
In military matters he was wholly modern. He established the beginnings of
a navy and it now seems plain that something very like the beginnings of a
military revolution, as described in the European context by Geoffrey Parker,
was brought about in Persia by Nader Shah. It was under Nader that the ma-
jority of troops in the army were equipped with firearms for the first time, ne-
cessitating a greater emphasis on drill and training—characteristic of
developments that had taken place in Europe in the previous century. Under
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162 A History of Iran

Nader the army increased greatly in size and cost, and he was forced to make
improvements in his capability for siege warfare. He began to reshape state
administration to make structures more efficient. These are all elements that
have been shown to be typical of the military revolution in Europe.
If Nader had reigned longer and more wisely, and had passed on his rule
to a competent successor, the drive to pay for his successful army could have
transformed the Persian state administration and ultimately the economy, as
happened in Europe. It could have brought about in Iran a modernizing
state capable of resisting colonial intervention in the following century. If
that had happened, Nader might today be remembered in the history of
Iran and the Middle East as a figure comparable with Peter the Great in
Russia: as a ruthless, militaristic reformer who set his country on a new
path. In the early 1740s he seemed set for great things—contemporaries
held their breath to see whether he could succeed in taking Ottoman Iraq
and establishing his supremacy through the Islamic world as a whole. He
had already achieved a large part of that task. Unfortunately, Nader’s de-
rangement in the last five years of his life meant that the expense of his mili-
tary innovations turned Persia into a desert rather than developing the
country. His insatiable demands for cash brought about his downfall and
the downfall of his dynasty.
Nader’s troops invaded Ottoman Iraq in 1743 and rapidly overran most of
the province, except the major cities. Baghdad and Basra were blockaded.
Nader brought up a new array of siege cannon and mortars to bombard
Kirkuk, which quickly surrendered, but the defense of Mosul was conducted
more resolutely. Nader’s new siege artillery pounded the walls and devastated
the interior of the city, but a lot of his men were killed in unsuccessful as-
saults, and he no longer had the will or patience to sustain a long siege. When
he withdrew, he sent peace proposals to the Ottomans. Mosul marked the
end of his ambition to subdue the Ottoman sultan and demonstrate his pre-
eminence in the Islamic world. It was another important turning point.
The latest round of forced contributions and requisitioning, to make
good the losses in Daghestan and provide for the campaign of 1743, had
caused great distress and resentment across Persia. Revolts broke out in As-
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 163

tarabad (led by Mohammad Hasan Khan Qajar, whose son was to found
the Qajar dynasty later in the century), Shiraz, and elsewhere. Early in 1744,
Nader withdrew to a camp near Hamadan, in order to be closer to the trou-
bles and coordinate action against them. The insurrections were put down
with great severity. Shiraz and Astarabad were devastated, and in each place
two white towers were erected, studded with niches that held the heads of
hundreds of executed men.
At length Nader realized that the Ottomans were not going to accept his
peace proposals—new Ottoman armies were advancing toward his frontiers.
Nader’s son Nasrollah defeated one of these forces, while Nader achieved vic-
tory over the other—near Yerevan, in the summer of 1745. This was his last
great victory, and it was followed by a treaty with the Ottomans in the follow-
ing year. But by this time, new revolts had broken out, driven by Nader’s op-
pressive practices: each place he visited was ransacked by his troops and tax
collectors, as if they were plundering enemies. His demands for money
reached insane levels, and cruel beatings, mutilations, and killings became
commonplace. His illness recurred and furthered his mental instability. By
the winter of 1746–1747 his crazy demands for money extended even to his
inner circle of family and close advisers, and no one could feel safe. His
nephew, Ali Qoli, joined a revolt in Sistan and refused to return to obedience.
Unlike previous rebels, Ali Qoli and his companions had contacts among
Nader’s closest attendants. In June 1747 Nader was assassinated by officers of
his own bodyguard near Mashhad. They burst into his tent in the harem
while he was sleeping. One of the assassins cut off his arm as he raised his
sword to defend himself, and then another sliced off his head.13
The short-lived nature of Nader’s achievements is one explanation for his
not being better known outside Iran, but it is not a sufficient one. With a
few exceptions Nader, having excited much interest and writing in Europe
among his eighteenth-century contemporaries, was largely ignored in the
nineteenth. Why should this have been so?
Without overstating the case, it seems plausible that it was because
Nader’s vigor and his successes fit badly with the crude Victorian view of the
Orient as incorrigibly decadent and corrupt, ripe for and in need of colo-
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164 A History of Iran

nization. From a purely British perspective, his military successes might

then have been thought to detract from the later victories of Clive and
Wellington in India, and to have conflicted with the myth of the supposedly
inherent superiority of European arms (an important element in the edifice
of British imperialism). By the latter part of the twentieth century the Great
Men of History—as Carlyle described them—could no longer be regarded
with the same hero worship they had enjoyed before, and the oblivion to
which Nader had been consigned was perhaps deepened by a general dis-
taste for conquerors.
But Nader’s historian, Mirza Mahdi Astarabadi, far from showing distaste,
celebrated Nader’s victories as a sign of the favor of God—and of God’s will
that Nader should reign. In this as well as in other respects, Mirza Mahdi’s ac-
count serves as a conduit for Nader’s own attitudes. Writing as Nader’s official
historian in Nader’s own lifetime, Mirza Mahdi was never likely to show any
radical independence of thought. An independent observer who met him de-
scribed him as “wise, humble, polite, attentive, and respectable. . . .” His history
is painstakingly accurate about dates and places, with only occasional lapses.
Having accompanied Nader on his campaigns from the earliest days, he was
in an almost unique position to know the facts of what happened, but he
tended to put a favorable gloss on events. On occasion he even omitted men-
tion of actions that would have reflected badly on Nader.
By far the greatest single omission in Mirza Mahdi’s narrative was his
failure to include the blinding of Reza Qoli Mirza in 1742. It is generally
agreed that Mirza Mahdi’s history was for the most part written as a chron-
icle while Nader was alive. But some years later he added a section dealing
with the last months of Nader’s life, and the aftermath of his assassination.
In this section the criticism he had been forced to suppress in Nader’s life-
time flooded out. He described how Nader’s cruelties, instead of calming
him, only made him more frenzied; and how many of his people were driven
by his oppression to abandon their houses and towns and take to the deserts
and mountains, or to emigrate. The words that Mirza Mahdi used to intro-
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 165

duce this last section of his history serve well to summarize Nader’s career.
He wrote,

From the beginning of Nader Shah’s reign until his return from Khwarezm
and his march into Daghestan, he was entirely occupied with the care of his
empire and the administration of justice, in such a manner that the people of
Iran would have given their lives for his preservation; but after this time he
changed his conduct entirely. At the instigation of some hostile spirit, this un-
happy monarch listened to ill-intentioned spies, and had the eyes of Reza
Qoli, the best and the dearest of his sons, torn out. Remorse quickly followed
this rash cruelty, and Nader Shah became like a madman. The reports of bad
news that he received in succession thereafter of troubles in various parts of
his dominion increased his rage.14

New Maps of Hell

The story of the decades after Nader’s death is one of chaos, destruction, vi-
olence, and misery. Anyone looking to restore their faith in the innate good-
ness of human nature would do well to skip the next few pages. After
Nader’s assassination his nephew Ali Qoli made himself shah, renamed
himself Adel Shah (which means The Just Shah—a misnomer), and sent
troops to Nader’s stronghold at Kalat-e Naderi in Khorasan. There they
murdered all but one of Nader’s sons and grandsons, and even cut open the
bellies of pregnant women in the harem to finish off heirs as yet unborn.
The army Nader had assembled, within which he had encouraged compe-
tition between commanders and ethnic groups, could not hold together once
he was gone. Like that of Alexander after his death, the army split, following
charismatic generals. The commander of the Afghans, Ahmad Khan Ab-
dali—whom Nader had released from prison in Kandahar in 1738—fought
Nader’s assassins in the camp and then left for home. Along the way he and
his men captured a quantity of treasure, including the fabulous Kuh-e Nur dia-
mond that Nader had taken from Delhi. On his arrival in Kandahar, Ahmad
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166 A History of Iran

was elected to be the first shah of the Durrani dynasty, founding a state
based on Kandahar, Herat, and Kabul that was to become modern Afghani-
stan. In this sense one could say that Afghanistan was founded in the muster
lists of Nader Shah. Another of Nader’s commanders, the Georgian Erekle,
who had accompanied him to Delhi, went home and established an inde-
pendent kingdom in Georgia. Most of the other ethnic and tribal groups
Nader had assembled in Khorasan returned home also, including the small
Zand tribe, originally from Lorestan (though perhaps ultimately of Kurdish
origin), under one of their leaders, Karim Khan, and the Bakhtiari, under
Ali Mardan Khan.
Adel Shah, who was unable to maintain control in an impoverished
country swarming with unemployed soldiers, was deposed after little more
than a year by his brother, Ebrahim. Other rulers followed, only to be de-
posed in turn: Nader’s surviving grandson, Shahrokh; then a Safavid descen-
dant of Shah Soleiman; then Shahrokh again (though he had been blinded
in the interim). Shahrokh remained in place from 1750 until 1796, seem-
ingly with the consent and even the protection of Ahmad Shah Durrani,
who respected him as the descendant of Nader. But from the early 1750s the
regime in Mashhad could exert little influence beyond Khorasan.15
Adel Shah’s brother Ebrahim had initially controlled Isfahan, but after he
moved east Karim Khan Zand and Ali Mardan Khan Bakhtiari took over
the western provinces, coming to an agreement with each other and ruling in
the name of another Safavid prince, Esma‘il III. Step-by-step Karim Khan
removed his rivals, killing Ali Mardan Khan in 1754 and deposing Esma‘il
in 1759. Karim Khan stabilized his regime by fighting off external rivals as
well: Azad Khan, another of Nader Shah’s Afghan commanders, who con-
trolled Azerbaijan; and Mohammad Hasan Khan Qajar, who had his power
base in Mazanderan. Karim Khan also fought the Ottomans and conquered
Basra, something Nader Shah had never achieved.
The rule of Karim Khan Zand created an island of relative calm and peace
in an otherwise bloody and destructive period. In the years of the Afghan re-
volt and the reign of Nader Shah, many cities in Iran were devastated by war
and repression (some, like Kerman, more than once—in 1719 and 1747—and
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 167

it was to suffer terribly again in 1794). By mid-century most of the built-up

area of Isfahan, the former capital, was deserted and inhabited only by owls
and wild animals. In the last years of the Safavids it had been a thriving city of
550,000 people, one of the world’s largest cities—similar in size to London at
the time, or even bigger.16 By the end of the siege of 1722 only 100,000 people
were left. Although many citizens later returned, the number fell yet further
during the Afghan occupation and beyond. By 1736 there were only 50,000
left.17 It has been estimated that the overall total population of Persia fell from
around nine million at the beginning of the century to perhaps six million or
less by mid-century—through war, disease, and emigration. Population levels
did not begin to rise significantly again until after 180018 (by contrast, the pop-
ulation of England rose from around six million in 1700 to around nine mil-
lion in 1800). Trade fell to one-fifth of its previous level.19
But despite the pitiful state into which the country had descended, the
major outside powers, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, did not intervene as
they had in 1722–1725. It was partly that they were busy elsewhere, and
surely also that the outcome of their previous attempts had not encouraged
them to repeat the experiment.
The eighteenth century has been portrayed as a period of tribal resur-
gence, and the names of the main parties contending for supremacy for
much of the century—Afshar, Zand, and Qajar—alone point in that direc-
tion.20 Many of the troops that fought in the civil wars, most of them horse-
men, were recruited from the nomadic tribes who still would have
comprised between one-third and one-half of the population. The makeup
of the tribes was complex and far from static—here were many different
terms to express different kinds of clans, tribal subdivisions, tribes, and
tribal confederations, and alliances between tribes occasionally formed,
broke, and reformed in new combinations. In the best of times—for cen-
turies if not millennia—the tribes lived in uneasy tension with the more
settled people of the towns and villages. The tribes and the townspeople
were usually divided by ethnicity, language, or religion, or by a combination
of all three. The tribesmen, living in more rugged mountain and arid terri-
tory, had rugged attitudes to go with their more marginal existence. They
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168 A History of Iran

raised livestock and traded their surplus to supply the towns and villages
with wool and meat. In return they received goods they could not make for
themselves—some foodstuffs as well as weapons. But in addition to this
more open form of exchange, there was often an exchange on the basis of se-
curity, one that was more or less disguised. Peasants might pay tribute to a
local tribal leader to have their crops left alone at harvest time, or to avoid
raids that might otherwise result in their being carried off as slaves (espe-
cially in the northeast). On the other hand, the local tribal leader might have
been co-opted to serve as the regional governor, in which case he would col-
lect tax instead of protection money. But in general, the tribes and their
leaders tended to have the upper hand, which they exploited politically.
Their position of supremacy was only decisively overturned when the twen-
tieth century was quite well advanced.
Karim Khan Zand did not have Nader’s insatiable love of war or his lust
for conquest, and his governmental system was less highly geared. After re-
moving Esma‘il, Karim Khan refused to make himself shah, ruling instead as
vakil-e ra’aya (deputy or regent of the people)—a modern-sounding title that
probably reflected his awareness of the weariness of the Iranian people and
their longing for peace. He restored traditional Shi‘ism as the religion in his
territories, dropping Nader’s experiment with Sunnism. Karim Khan chose
Shiraz as his capital, and built mosques, elegant gardens, and palaces that still
stand—erasing the scars of the revolt of 1744 and beautifying the city that
had been the home of Sa’di and Hafez. Karim Khan ruled there until his
death in 1779. He was a ruthless, tough leader, as was necessary in those harsh
times, but he also acquired an enduring reputation for modesty, compassion,
pragmatism, and good government, unlike most of his rivals. His reputation
shone the brighter for the surrounding ugliness and violence of his times.

Renewed War
After Karim Khan’s death, Persia lapsed again into the misery of civil war.
This time the struggle was between various Zand princes on the one side
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 169

and the Qajars, based in Mazanderan, on the other. The Qajars were united
by Agha Mohammad Khan (son of Mohammad Hasan Khan Qajar), who
had fallen into the hands of Adel Shah in 1747 or 1748 and had been cas-
trated at Adel Shah’s orders when he was only five or six years old. After that
Agha Mohammad was kept as a hostage by Karim Khan but was treated
kindly.21 Agha Mohammad grew up to be a fiercely intelligent, pragmatic
man, but also grim and bitter, with a bad temper and a vicious cruel streak
that grew worse as he got older. He was never able to overcome the loss of
his manhood. Contemporary illustrations depicted him as looking drawn
and beardless as a sign of it.
When Karim Khan died, Agha Mohammad escaped to the north, where
he successfully conciliated other branches of the Qajar tribe that had previ-
ously feuded with his family. But he had to fight his own brothers to estab-
lish his dominance. Agha Mohammad’s rise was much more firmly based on
his lineage and on the Qajar tribe than that of Nader Shah had been based
on the Afshars. Once his supremacy within the tribe was achieved, Agha
Mohammad ejected Zand forces from Mazanderan and began campaigning
south of the Alborz mountains, with the help of the Yomut Turkmen allies
that had long supported his family. But when he arrived outside Tehran, the
gates were closed against him. The citizens politely told him that the Zands
were in charge in Isfahan. That meant that the people of Tehran had to obey
the Zands, but it also implied that if Agha Mohammad Khan could take Is-
fahan, they would obey him, too. Agha Mohammad marched on to Isfahan,
taking it in the early part of 1785. He was then duly accepted into Tehran in
March 1786, after other successful campaigning in the west. From then on it
became clear that he intended to establish himself as ruler of the whole
country, and Tehran has been the capital since that time.
There was to be much more fighting before Agha Mohammad could rule
supreme, and he was still far from secure in the south. Isfahan changed
hands several times. But the Zands could not deliver a knockout blow ei-
ther, and in January 1789 their leader ( Ja‘far Khan) was assassinated. The
ruling family of the Zands then fought among themselves for the leadership,
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170 A History of Iran

until Lotf Ali Khan Zand, a young grand-nephew of Karim Khan, entered
Shiraz in May 1789, establishing his control.
Lotf Ali Khan was young and charismatic and a natural focus for the
hopes of those who remembered the prestige of his great uncle, but militar-
ily he was at a disadvantage from the start. He fought off an attack by Agha
Mohammad in June 1789, but when he made a move on Isfahan in 1791
Shiraz revolted against him behind his back. He returned but was blocked
from re-entering his former capital and was forced to lay siege to the city.
The Shirazis sent for help to Agha Mohammad—and sent Lotf Ali Khan’s
family as prisoners to him too. Lotf Ali Khan was able to defeat a combined
force of Qajars and troops from Shiraz, but the city still held out. Then in
1792 Agha Mohammad himself marched south with a large army. By this
time Agha Mohammad was showing some of the fierce anger and vicious
cruelty for which he later became notorious. At one point he saw a coin
minted in Lotf Ali’s name and became so enraged that he gave orders for the
Zand’s son to be castrated.
Lotf Ali Khan now nearly brought off a coup that could have won him
the war. As Agha Mohammad approached Shiraz, he camped with his Qajar
troops near the ancient sites of Persepolis and Istakhr. After night fell, Lotf
Ali approached the camp with a smaller force and attacked from several di-
rections in the dark. Chaos erupted. Lotf Ali sent thirty or forty men right
into the camp, penetrating as far as Agha Mohammad’s private compound,
which was defended against them by a few musketeers. At this point one of
Agha Mohammad’s courtiers went to Lotf Ali and told him that Agha Mo-
hammad had fled. The battle appeared to be over and Lotf Ali was per-
suaded that further fighting would only risk his own troops killing one
another in the dark. He ordered his men to sheathe their sabres. Many of
them dispersed, plundered the parts of the camp they were in control of, and
left the scene with the booty. But when dawn came Lotf Ali discovered to
his horror that Agha Mohammad was still there. He had not fled, and the
Qajar troops were regrouping around him. With only one thousand of his
own men still with him, Lotf Ali Khan was surrounded and outnumbered.
He quickly withdrew, fleeing eastward.22
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 171

From this point on Lotf Ali Khan’s support began to dwindle away. He
captured Kerman, but Agha Mohammad Khan moved against the city and
besieged it. The Qajars broke into the city by treachery in October 1794
and Lotf Ali Khan fled to Bam. Agha Mohammad ordered that the women
and children of Kerman be given over to his soldiers as slaves; the surviving
men were to be blinded. To ensure that his orders were followed, he de-
manded that the men’s eyeballs be cut out, brought to him in baskets, and
poured out on the floor. There were twenty thousand of them. Sir John
Malcolm recorded that these blinded victims were later to be found begging
across Persia, telling the story of the disaster that had befallen their city.23
Lotf Ali Khan was betrayed in Bam and was taken in chains to Agha Mo-
hammad, who ordered his Turkmen slaves to do to him “what had been
done by the people of Lot.” After the gang rape, Lotf Ali Khan was blinded
and sent to Tehran, where he was tortured to death.24
Agha Mohammad Khan was now the undisputed master of the Iranian
plateau. He turned to the northwest, where he marched into Georgia and re-
asserted Persian sovereignty. In September 1795 he conquered Tbilisi after a
furious battle in which the Georgians seemed to be winning at several
points, despite their inferior numbers. Thousands were massacred in Tbilisi,
and fifteen thousand women and children were taken away as slaves. But the
king of Georgia had put himself under Russian protection in 1783, and the
destruction of Tbilisi caused anger in St Petersburg. Later on, it was to
bring humiliation for Persia in the Caucasus.
In the spring of 1796 Agha Mohammad had himself crowned on the
Moghan plain, where Nader Shah had assumed the same dignity exactly
sixty years earlier. At the coronation Agha Mohammad wore armbands on
which were mounted the Darya-ye Nur and the Taj-e Mah jewels taken from
Lotf Ali Khan, which had previously belonged to Nader Shah. Agha Mo-
hammad Khan liked jewels. After the coronation he marched east to Kho-
rasan, where he accepted the submission of Shahrokh, Nader Shah’s
grandson. He had Shahrokh tortured until he gave up more jewels, also
from the treasure Nader had brought away from Delhi. Shahrokh died of
the treatment shortly afterward, in Damghan.
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172 A History of Iran

Agha Mohammad Shah had now resumed control of the main territories
of Safavid Persia, with the exception of the Afghan provinces. But he did
not enjoy them, or his jewels, for long. In June 1797, while campaigning in
what is now Nagorno-Karabakh, he was stabbed to death by two of his ser-
vants, whom he had sentenced to be executed but unwisely left alive and at
liberty overnight.

Religious Change: Seeds of Revolution

Eighteenth-century Persia was not just a place of massacre and misery.
Many if not most places away from the major towns and cities probably con-
tinued in relative tranquillity for most of the period. And other develop-
ments were at work—changes in Shi‘a theology and in the religious-social
structure of Shi‘ism—that were to have crucial importance in the longer
term. The old argument between tradition and reason, which had rolled
back and forth in a Sunni context between the Mu’tazilis and their oppo-
nents in the time of the Abbasids, resurfaced in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries in a different form. This dispute, between what came to be
called the Akhbari and Usuli schools, was not to be resolved until the nine-
teenth century.
The Akhbaris asserted that ordinary Muslims should read and interpret
the holy texts for themselves, without the need for intermediaries. The tra-
ditions (hadith)—especially the traditions of the Shi‘a Emams—were the
best guide. The Usulis rejected this doctrine, saying that authoritative inter-
pretation (ijtihad) on the basis of reason was necessary and required ex-
tended scholarly training, which could only be achieved by specially talented
scholars among the ulema, called mojtaheds. Almost all areas of human con-
duct were open to ijtihad (the Akhbaris had taken the view that disputes
that could not be resolved by precedents in the holy texts would have to be
referred to the secular powers).
The Usulis eventually won the argument, thanks largely to the leadership
of the great mojtahed Aqa Mohammad Baqer Behbehani (1706–1790). But
the Akhbaris, whose views were closer to the orthodoxy of Sunnism, had a
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 173

moment of near-triumph during the reign of Nader Shah, supported by

Nader’s ambiguous but broadly pro-Sunni policy.25 The dispute was not
fully resolved until the early Qajar period, by which time a theory of inter-
pretation and a hierarchy had developed on this basis: each Shi‘a Muslim
had to have a marja-e taqlid, an “object of emulation” or religious role model.
This had to be a living person, a mojtahed, which in practice meant only one
or two of just a few mojtaheds in each generation. As some were thus ele-
vated, a hierarchy of mojtaheds came to be created. The senior, more author-
itative among them became known as hojjatoleslam (proof of Islam), ayatollah
(sign of God), or, later, grand ayatollah. Just as in other contexts, competi-
tion for the titles produced a kind of inflation:26 as more people acquired the
original titles, new, more exalted ones had to be invented.
In this way, a religion that—in the absence of the hidden Emam—for-
mally still asserted the illegitimacy of all authority on earth paradoxically
came to give a few religious scholars great potential power. This power even-
tually came to flex its muscles not just in religion but also in politics. The
position of the ulema was further strengthened by the fact that the leading
marjas often lived in Najaf or Karbala in Ottoman Iraq, beyond the reach of
the Persian authorities. Shi‘ism acquired a hierarchical structure, compara-
ble to those of the Christian churches, but markedly different from the less
hierarchical arrangements of Judaism and Sunni Islam. The combination of
beliefs—in the illegitimacy of secular authority, in the righteousness of the
oppressed, and in the legitimacy of an organized hierarchy of clerics—looks
with the benefit of hindsight like a recipe for eventual religious revolution.
There was—is—a further important element in this religious culture:
the various manifestations of popular Shi‘ism, including most importantly
the Ashura processions and the ta’zieh. Every year, on the anniversary of the
martyrdom of the Emam Hosein at Karbala, Shi‘a Muslims in Iran and else-
where take part in processions through towns and villages to commemorate
the bitter events of that day. The best way to think of these is as reenacted
funeral processions, in which devotion to and identification with the mar-
tyrs of Karbala is as vivid and strong as the feeling for the dead at a real fu-
neral. Bazaar guilds and strongmen from the zur-khaneh (the house of
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174 A History of Iran

strength—traditional associations of men who gather to build their fitness

through juggling heavy clubs, wrestling, and other sweaty pursuits, but often
with religious overtones) compete to display their devotion and grief. Some
carry large symbolic coffins representing the coffin of Hosein, or huge multi-
pointed symbolic banners representing his war standard. Others beat them-
selves with chains. Some also cut their heads with swords, but this is an
excess that has been increasingly frowned upon by the religious authorities.
The Ashura demonstrations build a collective sense of grief, bitterness, in-
justice, and guilt (the last from the failure of the Kufans to save Hosein), re-
living emotionally the grim events of Karbala. Western news media find
images of these processions irresistible when they need to illustrate accounts
of Shi‘a religious fanaticism, but the emotions of grief and guilt and the
symbolic representations of suffering (even the blood in some cases) are—as
mentioned earlier—strikingly similar to those in traditional Good Friday
processions in many Catholic countries in Europe and elsewhere. It would
be possible to interleave film sequences of both in such a way that the gloom,
tears, and intensity of the participants would be almost indistinguishable.
The ta’zieh is a form of religious street theater, unique in the Islamic world
but similar in spirit and function to the religious mystery plays of medieval
Europe. Again, the usual theme is Karbala, but the performance may focus
on different aspects of the drama. The performers recite familiar lines de-
scribing the action and the audience may join in. Those watching experience
and show tears and intense emotion. The ta’zieh normally occurs in the
month of Moharram and Ashura, but rowzeh-khans (preachers) used to recite
impromptu versions at any time of the year. Through the nineteenth century
many eminent Iranians erected buildings, as acts of piety, to house the ta’zieh
performances. Previously they had taken place in tents or on street corners.27
All these manifestations have served to remind Shi‘a Muslims of the cen-
tral events of their religion. But they have also reinforced a commitment to
collective religious feeling based on the sense of injustice that many op-
pressed and downtrodden communities of Shi‘as have felt at different times
and places. The emotions and the custom of street processions may serve as
a kind of precedent, or template, for collective action and collective solidar-
ity, as has appeared at several points in Iranian history.
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 175

But to characterize the grief of Ashura as a kind of training ground or

launch pad for street demonstrations or even mob violence (notwithstand-
ing that such have happened, in exceptional circumstances) would be a gross
distortion. The more normal association in Shi‘ism is with passive melan-
choly, modesty, a belief in the righteousness of humble self sacrifice, and in
the virtue of quietly doing good in adverse circumstances.
The eighteenth century in the Islamic world (the concept itself is question-
able—in Islamic terms we are talking mainly about the twelfth century,
though the centuries do not exactly correspond in the two calendars) has often
been depicted as a period of decline and decadence. It is easy to see why that
was the case—the Ottoman Empire lost territory, the Safavid monarchy col-
lapsed, and so did the Moghul dynasty, ushering in the period of European
colonial dominance. These are facts that cannot be denied. But there were im-
portant signs of change, development, and vigor in the Islamic world that have
often been overlooked. Some of them were significant in their own right,
while others contained the seeds of major future developments. We have al-
ready looked at the importance of the reign of Nader Shah, though its sig-
nificance emerges more fully in the light of the Persian/Russian wars of
1804–1828. Also, the Akhbari/Usuli dispute and its outcome were important
for the future development of the Shi‘a ulema in Iran, and the Iranian revolu-
tions of the twentieth century cannot be properly understood without them.
But there were other significant developments in the Islamic world in this
period—notably the rise of Wahhabism in Arabia. According to some ac-
counts the movement’s founder, Abd al-Wahhab, studied for a time in Isfa-
han, though this seems doubtful.28 His was a truly fundamentalist movement
within Sunnism, one deeply hostile to Sufism, Shi‘ism, any real or apparent
kind of departure from monotheism, and any form of what it called “innova-
tion”—all of which it considered heretical. Wahhabism insisted on a return
to what its exponents considered to be the earliest principles of Islam, as ex-
emplified by Mohammad and his earliest converts. In alliance with the Al-
Saud family, devotees of Wahhabism made progress in Arabia until the early
nineteenth century, destroying shrines and tombs in their fervor, and sacking
Karbala itself in 1802. That was a deep shock and a great insult to Shi‘a Mus-
lims. By 1818 Ottoman forces had defeated the Al-Saud and reasserted their
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176 A History of Iran

control of the Arabian peninsula and the holy places. But the Al-Saud and
the Wahhabis returned to take control of most of the Arabian peninsula in
the twentieth century.

Fath Ali Shah

After the death of Agha Mohammad Shah, Persia could again have slid into
chaos and civil war, as had happened after the death of Karim Khan Zand.
That this did not occur was largely due to the foresight of Agha Moham-
mad Shah in the 1780s and after, as he resolved feuds within the Qajar tribe
and prepared the succession for his nephew Fath Ali Khan, and for Fath Ali
Khan’s son Abbas Mirza.29 There were some disturbances in Azerbaijan, and
Fath Ali Khan marched to assert his authority. He defeated his enemies near
Qazvin, and went on to punish the old shah’s murderers and have Agha Mo-
hammad’s body buried in Najaf. He then had himself crowned, on March
21, 1798, at the feast of Noruz, the New Year.
Fath Ali Shah has some prominence in the history of Iran for a variety of
contingent and unrelated reasons. One is that it was during his reign that
Europeans suddenly began traveling to and reporting back from Persia in
larger numbers, both as tourists and as state representatives operating out
of diplomatic missions. This was because Fath Ali Shah’s reign coincided
with the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and the European powers
were reaching out in competition with one another to find new allies. An-
other reason is that Fath Ali Shah encouraged a new wave of portrait paint-
ing, the favorite subject of which was himself, resplendent with waist-long
black beard and spangled with jewels from belt to arms to crown. So a
wealth of arresting images of him have survived to the present day. Unlike
his uncle and other predecessors like Karim Khan Zand and Nader Shah,
Fath Ali Shah loved magnificence. A further claim to fame was his prodi-
gious fathering of children—it has been calculated that he had by the end
of his reign a total of 260 sons by 158 wives. Finally, he reigned for a rela-
tively long time—thirty-seven years—and from that fact alone he later
symbolized an era.
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 177

Some of these factors have combined to give a broadly negative impres-

sion of Fath Ali Shah that may not be wholly justified. Many of the Euro-
peans who reported back about Persia at his time made invidious and
sometimes ignorant and prejudiced comparisons between Persia and Eu-
rope. Many of them did not fully realize the degree of the trauma and de-
struction Persia had suffered over the previous century, nor the very
different nature of state and government in Persia. The other inescapable
fact was that Persia lost large swathes of valuable territory in the Caucasus
to the Russians during the reign of Fath Ali Shah, and the performance of
his armies in the wars against Russia was for the most part poor.
But from another perspective Fath Ali Shah’s reign looks more successful.
Building on his uncle’s achievements, he avoided serious civil war (no small
thing in itself ), and his reign saw a modest renewal of economic activity and
prosperity. Persia lost territory but preserved her independence, and kept
the bulk of her lands free from warfare in a dangerous and destructive
period of international conflict. It could have been worse. Sir John Malcolm,
probably the most knowledgeable and balanced foreign observer of Persia at
this time, wrote in 1814,

Fortunately Persia is at present happier and more tranquil than it has been for
a long period; and its reigning monarch, who has already occupied the throne
seventeen years, by the comparative mildness and justice of his rule has al-
ready entitled himself to a high rank among the Kings of Persia.30

Encounter with the West: Diplomacy and War

The story of Persia’s dealings with the Western powers in the reign of Fath
Ali Shah would be almost comical if the consequences, both short and long
term, had not proved so damaging. From the perspectives of the individual
European states themselves, their conduct was logical, if shortsighted, given
wartime necessity. From a Persian perspective, it looks fickle and crass.
But it began well: the first European mission successfully to agree to a
treaty was from the English East India Company (EIC), and they knew how
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178 A History of Iran

to handle things. In 1800 the company sent a very able young man, the fu-
ture historian John Malcolm, with a retinue of some five hundred men, in-
cluding a military escort of one hundred Indian cavalry. The almost royal
progress of this caravan made a strong impression, as did the lavish gifts the
company could afford to send with it. The government of India and its
counterpart in London had been shocked by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt
in 1798, and alarmed by a French mission to Tehran in 1796. They were de-
termined to make an alliance with Persia to secure the western approaches
to India. The alliance could also be used against the danger of Afghan incur-
sion into northern India. In January 1801 political and commercial treaties
were signed, according to which the French were to be excluded from Persia,
and Fath Ali Shah agreed to attack the Afghans if the Afghans made any in-
cursion in India. The British agreed to send “cannon and warlike stores” if
the Afghans or the French were to attack Persia. The company’s commercial
privileges in Persia were confirmed and enhanced, and a solid Anglo-Persian
alliance seemed to be taking shape.31
But the big question mark over the treaties was Russia, which was a more
immediate concern for the Persians than France. After Agha Mohammad’s
massacre at Tbilisi in 1795, the Russians established a protectorate in Geor-
gia, stationed troops there in 1799, and later abolished the Georgian monar-
chy after the death of its king—effectively annexing the territory. Fath Ali
Shah continued to declare Persia’s sovereignty over Georgia, to no avail, and
Russian generals speculated about pushing the Russian frontier farther
south, to the Araxes. In 1804, led by a brutal general called Tsitsianov, the
Russians set about it in earnest, taking Ganja and massacring as many as
three thousand people there (including five hundred Muslims who had
taken sanctuary in a mosque). They fought an inconclusive battle against
Fath Ali Shah’s son Abbas Mirza outside Yerevan. But as Nader Shah had
discovered to his cost, and as many later Russian military men including
Tolstoy and Lermontov were to confirm, the Caucasus was an awkward
place to go soldiering. The war proved more difficult than Tsitsianov had an-
ticipated, and a little later the Persians succeeded in killing him by a trick.
The Russians suggested some negotiations with the Persian governor of
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 179

Baku, but the Persian governor, suspecting bad faith, made preparations for
an assassination. Tsitsianov and the governor both went to the appointed
meeting place with just three attendants each, but when they arrived the
governor’s nephew shot Tsitsianov through the chest.32
In the meantime, British interest in Persia had faded. It was complicated:
after a short peace between Britain and France, hostilities reopened between
them, and whereas before 1801 the British had suspected Russia of wanting
to cooperate with the French against India, they now secured an alliance
with Russia against Napoleon. Fath Ali Shah invoked the Treaty of 1801
and asked the British for help against Russia in the Caucasus, but the
British valued their northern ally more than their Persian one. They ignored
the request.
Seeing an opportunity, the French made overtures to the Persians and in
May 1807 Fath Ali Shah agreed to sign the Treaty of Finckenstein with
them (the treaty was signed in East Prussia, as Napoleon’s army recovered
from the bloody Battle of Eylau and prepared for a renewed attack on the
Russians). This was a mirror image of the previous treaty with the British:
the Persians agreed to expel the British and to attack India; Napoleon recog-
nized Persian sovereignty over Georgia and promised military assistance
against the Russians; and a mission under the Frenchman Claude Matthieu,
Count Gardane, set out for Tehran to fulfill those terms. But before Gar-
dane could get there Napoleon defeated the Russians decisively at Friedland
in June 1807, and signed a treaty of alliance with the Russian tsar at Tilsit
the next month. The diplomatic dance swung around, and the partners
changed again.
With a French military mission in Tehran training up a Persian army to
invade India, the British were impressed once more with the urgency of an al-
liance with Fath Ali Shah. But because the government in London and the
East India Company government in India could not agree on which should
take precedence in policy on Persia, they sent two competing missions—one
from London under Sir Harford Jones, and one from Bombay again headed
by John Malcolm. Malcolm got to Persia first but was allowed no farther than
Bushire, because of Fath Ali Shah’s commitments to the French; Malcolm
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180 A History of Iran

sailed back to Bombay in July 1808 after three fruitless months. Meanwhile,
Count Gardane was in an impossible position, training Persians whose only
real interest was in the continuing war with Russia and the re-conquest of
Georgia. And Russia was now France’s ally. Harford Jones succeeded where
Malcolm had failed, reaching Tehran in March 1809. Gardane, by now dis-
credited, flitted out of the country a month later, abandoning France’s com-
mitments to Persia.
Jones and the Persians signed a Treaty of Friendship and Alliance that
went further than the Treaty of 1801 and gave the Persians more watertight
guarantees. The Persians were to receive help against any invading European
power, even if Britain had made a separate peace with that power, provided
Persia was not the aggressor. The help was to be in the form of British troops,
or failing that, subsidies, cannon, muskets, and British officers. For his part,
the shah undertook not to do anything to endanger British interests in India,
and to give military assistance in case of an attack by the Afghans.
But although the British encouraged Fath Ali Shah to continue the costly
war with the Russians, when Napoleon attacked Russia in 1812 Britain and
Russia again became allies, and Britain’s enthusiasm for helping Persia
against the Russians evaporated. The war in the Caucasus was now, for
Britain, an embarrassment that needed tidying up. Although the Persians
fought hard with some successes under Fath Ali’s son Abbas Mirza, their
failures were more damaging, culminating in October 1812 in a heavy defeat
at Aslanduz on the Araxes. Britain served as a mediator for a peace signed at
Golestan in October 1813. The treaty was a terrible humiliation. Persia kept
Yerevan and Nakhichevan, but lost everything else north of the Araxes, in-
cluding Daghestan, Shirvan, and Georgia, and cities that had been part of
the Persian Empire for centuries—Darband, Baku, Tblisi, and Ganja
among them.33 It also included provisions that only the Russians could
maintain warships on the Caspian Sea, and that Russia would recognize and
support the legitimate heir to the throne of Persia. This last point gave the
Russians a locus for meddling in the royal succession, which was to prove se-
riously damaging. When the terms of the treaty became known, they caused
anger in Persia and calls for renewed jihad against the Russians, led by belli-
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 181

cose mullahs in the towns. Abbas Mirza regarded the treaty only as a truce,
and redoubled his efforts to turn the army he controlled in Azerbaijan into a
modernized force that could fight the Russians on equal terms.
It didn’t work. War was renewed with Russia in 1826, after a period in
which Abbas Mirza drew further help from the British (who with the final
defeat of Napoleon in 1815 grew more anti-Russian again), and another ag-
gressive Russian general, Yermolov, did his best to alienate the new subject
populations—over-interpreting the terms of the Golestan treaty and fur-
ther irritating the Persians. Yermolov proved more belligerent in peace than
in war, and the Persians made some initial gains, marching toward Tbilisi
and up the Caspian coast. Many local leaders went over to the Persian side,
and Yermolov abandoned Ganja. But soon Russian reinforcements arrived
under more active commanders. Once war was begun, the British refused
further help, pointing to the clause in the Treaty of 1809 that exempted
them from doing so if Persia were the aggressor. Before the year was out the
armies of Abbas Mirza and his brother Mohammad Mirza were defeated in
separate battles, Ganja was retaken, and the Persians were back where they
had started. In 1827 the Russians advanced farther, taking Yerevan at the be-
ginning of October and Tabriz later in the month.
The mountains and forests of the Caucasus were ideal country for guer-
rilla warfare, and if, especially in this second war, when the local tribes were
ill-disposed toward the Russians, the Persians had fought in that way, they
might have been more successful. The Lezges had fought off Nader Shah
with guerrilla tactics in the 1740s, and they (with the Chechens) would give
the Russians enormous difficulties in the long wars they fought in the de-
cades after 1830. But the Persians had seen themselves as equals of the Rus-
sians, and had aspired to fight them in the open field. They disdained to fight
the hit-and-run war of the ragged Sunni tribesmen of the Caucasus, whose
overlords they had been for centuries. That was their mistake; they were not
flexible enough, and misjudged the measure of Russian military superiority.
Peace was concluded at Turkmanchai in February 1828, with even more
humiliating terms than those of Golestan. Persia lost Yerevan, and the border
was set at the river Araxes. Persia had to pay Russia twenty million rubles as
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182 A History of Iran

reparations and all captives had to be returned to Russian territory—even if

they had been taken twenty or more years before. According to commercial
agreements made at the same time, Russian merchants were to be allowed to
operate freely in Persia, and (these provisions were aptly named capitula-
tions) were effectively exempt from Persian jurisdiction.34
The treaty had a violent and undiplomatic postscript. A distinguished lit-
erary man and friend of Pushkin, Alexander Griboyedov, arrived in Tehran
as Russian Minister Plenipotentiary and set about enforcing the terms of
the treaty, being particularly exercised about the provisions over the return
of captives. He set about extricating from Persian families women who had
been taken captive as Christians but who had subsequently converted. Some
of these women were less than keen to be rescued, and the Russians’ interfer-
ence in private Persian households gave great offense, which was whipped up
further by radical mullahs. A mob gathered outside the Russian embassy on
January 30, 1829. One account says a Cossack on the roof shot a boy in the
crowd.35 The mob broke in and found and murdered an Armenian eunuch
who had previously served the shah. Two women were also dragged away,
and several of the crowd were killed in the fighting as the Cossacks who
served as guards tried to protect the building. The bodies were carried away
to the mosques, but later the mob returned, broke in again, and massacred
all the Russians except one, who escaped dressed as a Persian. Griboyedov
was apparently convinced that the shah himself was behind the attacks. It
seems his last words were Fath Ali Shah! Je m’en fous!36
Fath Ali Shah could perhaps have tried harder to control the situation
that led to the killings, but it is most unlikely that he was in any serious way
to blame (some Russians have blamed the British ambassador also, for incit-
ing the mob, which illustrates the rivalry between the two powers in Persia
by this time, but has no basis in fact). Fath Ali Shah had to send a mission to
St. Petersburg to present his apologies and smooth things over.
The Persian/Russian wars and their consequences illustrated a number
of important realities about the state of Fath Ali Shah’s realm. Militarily and
economically, it was no match for the European powers. The army Abbas
Mirza led into the Caucasus in 1826 was thirty-five thousand strong, which
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The Fall of the Safavids and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty 183

RU S SIA Qajar Persia

N
DA Darband
GH
Tiflis E RU S SIA
GEO RGIA TA

S
N 0 200
Baku
km
Yere van R .
A ras
Merv
La k e Aslanduz C a s p i a n
V an
Ashkhabad
Ardebil S e a
Tabriz
Quchan
Mianeh Enzeli
Urmiyeh Astarabad
Maragha Resht Mashhad

K
MAZ Nishapur
AND

H
Zanjan E RA N

O
Qazvin

R
Tehran Turbat-e-Haidari

A
S
K U R D I S TA N A Herat
N
Hamadan Qom Dasht-e K avir
Qasr-e-Shirin Qain
Kermanshah Saltanabad Tabas
Kerend Kashan
Birjand AFGHANISTAN
Bo rujerd
Baghdad L O R E S TA N

Da
Ti
gri s

sh
R. Isfahan -e

t
Dezful Lu
Yazd t
Shushtar S I STA N .
Masjed-e-Soleiman dR
H e l ma n
E u p hr
n

a t es
ru

R. Ahwaz Kerman
Ka

Mohammerah
OTTOMAN Basra
INDIA
Kazerun Bam
EMPIRE Shiraz
Bushire
pre-1801 border FARS
Bampur
1813 border Bandar Abbas
Lingeh M A KR A N
1828 border
P e r s i a n Jask Chahbahar
NO T E . T he bo rders o f Persia in the no r theast and
east were defined by ag reements with Russia and G u l f
Britain in the latter par t o f the nineteenth cent ur y. Gul f of Oman

was large by comparison with those that had fought the civil wars forty years
earlier, but the Russians had lost a larger number of men as casualties in a
single day when they fought Napoleon at Borodino in 1812. The Russians
had some difficulties getting troops to the Caucasus and in supplying them
once there, but their reserves of manpower and war materials were impossi-
ble for the Persians to equal—even if the Persians could have come up to the
Russian standard of drill, training, and staff work.
The point was not that the Persians were bad soldiers, nor really that they
had fallen behind technologically (not yet). It was just that the Qajar state
was not the same kind of state, nor was it trying to be.37 It controlled its terri-
tory loosely, through proxies and alliances with local tribes. The state bu-
reaucracy was small, revolving around the court much as it had in the days of
the Safavids. It has been estimated that between a half and a third of the
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184 A History of Iran

population were still nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists.38 Provincial gov-

ernors were often tribal leaders. They ruled independently, with little inter-
ference from the capital, and sent there what tax revenue was left after they
had deducted their own expenses, which was not usually very much (Abbas
Mirza’s army was largely recruited and paid for from the province of Azerbai-
jan in which he was governor). To raise money for the wars, Fath Ali Shah
had alienated crown lands, increasing the devolved tendency. Nader Shah
would have handled matters differently, but the apparent lesson of his reign
was that ambition, greater integration, centralization, militarism, and higher
taxation went together—they alienated important supporters, created oppo-
sition and revolt, and led to civil war. All Persian rulers after Nader, from
Karim Khan Zand onward (even Agha Mohammad Shah), seemed to have
absorbed that lesson. They rejected Nader’s model and accepted a more de-
volved state as the price of stability and popular consent to their rule.
The other side of the story is that most Iranians at the time probably pre-
ferred it this way. In the smaller towns and villages of the country (where
most still lived), the wars in Armenia and Shirvan were a long way off, and
there would have been only sporadic (and inaccurate) news of them. The
civil wars between the Qajars and the Zands, let alone the earlier revolts in
the time of Nader Shah and the Afghans, had affected many more Iranians
either directly or indirectly through economic dislocation. Those terrible
events were still within living memory, and most Iranians would have been
grateful to have been spared them. Under Fath Ali Shah some moderate
prosperity returned to these traditional communities.
But the popular agitation for war and the murder of Griboyedov showed
the influence of the mullahs, and the closeness of some of them to at least
one important strand of popular feeling in the towns (as always, one should
be wary of assuming all the mullahs thought the same way—they did not).
In later decades, as other European powers demanded, secured, and ex-
ploited the same privileges as those accorded the Russians at Turkmanchai,
popular feeling became more and more bitter at the apparent inability of the
Qajar monarchy to uphold Persian sovereignty and dignity.
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6
The Crisis of the
Qajar Monarchy, the
Revolution of 1905–1911,
and the Accession of the
Pahlavi Dynasty

Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our

interest that as little should happen as possible.
—Lord Salisbury, writing about
Persian affairs in December 1879

[Aya] ma ra az mum sakhta-and?

Are we made of wax?
—Naser od-Din Shah, March 18551

Fath Ali Shah died in 1834, shortly after the death of his son, Abbas Mirza,
who had been his designated heir. This meant that another son, Moham-
mad, took the throne. Mohammad Shah’s accession was supported by both
the Russians and the British and was achieved peacefully—they judged,

185
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186 A History of Iran

correctly, that he would uphold the treaties that gave them their privileges
within Persia. But his reign brought few benefits for the Persian people. He
made little real effort to develop the country or defend its essential inter-
ests, despite the increasingly manifest developmental gap between Persia
and Europe. His first prime minister was a reformer, but the shah had him
strangled in 1835. Persian merchants began to protest the fact that cheap
European products, especially textiles, were coming onto Persian markets
with low or no tariffs and were undercutting domestic craftsmen, destroy-
ing their livelihoods. Predictably, the merchants who made a profit from
handling the imports kept quiet.
Perhaps partly in reaction to the defeat in war, the humiliating treaty of
Turkmanchai, and the increasing and unwelcome presence of foreigners and
foreign influences, there were attacks on minorities in the 1830s—especially
the Jews. These tended to be led, as at other times, by preachers or mullahs
of marginal status who disregarded the established, humane, and dignified
precepts of their faith for the temporary popularity that could accrue from
extremism and hatred. A serious attack by a mob in Tabriz in 1830 seems to
have resulted in the death or flight of most of the previous Jewish popula-
tion there. It may have begun (like similar cases in medieval Europe) with a
false allegation that a Muslim child had been murdered by a Jew.2 Other
such attacks followed elsewhere in Azerbaijan, prompting Jews to begin
avoiding the whole province. There were also forced conversions of Jews in
Shiraz and other places: in Mashhad in 1839 a riot broke out and many Jews
were killed before moderate Shi‘a clergy intervened. The Jews were then
forced to convert or flee.3 For many years the converts, called jadidi, kept to
themselves in their own communities; many such converts still observed
Jewish rites in private, and some eventually reverted to Judaism, risking be-
ing accused of apostasy if they did. Later in the century there were similar
outbreaks at Babol on the Caspian Sea (in 1866) and in Hamadan (1892).4
Jewish and other travelers recorded that the Jews they saw were generally liv-
ing in poor ghettoes and were subject to daily low-level intimidation and hu-
miliation, though their position may have improved toward the end of the
century, in some places at least. There was persecution elsewhere in the Is-
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Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905–1911, and the Pahlavi Dynasty 187

lamic world at the same time, and some have suggested that the impact of
European anti-Semitic writings was a factor.5 No doubt only a small minor-
ity of Muslims were actively involved in attacks, and there is evidence that
some ulema and others did what they could to prevent or limit them. But as
in other times and other places, it could not have happened at all without
the majority preferring to look away. The Armenians seem generally to have
avoided this degree of persecution in this period.
Despite their agreement on the succession, in the time of Mohammad
Shah the British and Russians were still rivals in Persia, Afghanistan, and
Central Asia. This rivalry came to be called The Great Game. Before the
war of 1826–1828, the British had supported the Persians against the Rus-
sians; now the Russians encouraged Mohammad Shah to take compensa-
tion for Persia’s loss of territory in that war by grabbing back the former
territories of Herat and Kandahar in the east. Mohammad Shah sent troops
to Herat in 1837, besieging the place for a few months.6 But the British, who
disliked the prospect of any encroachment in Afghanistan that might
threaten India or make Russian access to India any easier, occupied Kharg
Island in the Persian Gulf and demanded that Mohammed Shah quit Af-
ghanistan. He withdrew in 1838 and made further trading concessions to
Britain in a new treaty in 1841.
Hajji Mirza Aqasi, Mohammad Shah’s second prime minister (who had
been instrumental in the removal and killing of the first), was pro-Sufi and
encouraged the shah to follow his example. Fath Ali Shah had always been
careful to conciliate the ulema, but Mohammad Shah’s Sufi inclinations
made him deeply unpopular with them, bringing forward again the ever-
latent Shi‘a antagonism toward secular authority.

The Babi Movement, Naser od-Din Shah,

and Amir Kabir
Another development during the reign of Mohammad Shah was the ap-
pearance in Iran of the Babi movement, which eventually gave rise to the
Baha’i religion. This originated around the year 1844, which was 1260 in the
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188 A History of Iran

Muslim calendar—a year that had been long awaited as the one-thousandth
anniversary of the disappearance of the twelfth Emam. Since the eighteenth
century, followers of a branch of Shi‘ism called Shaykhism had speculated
that there must be a gate (“Bab”) through which the Hidden Emam could
communicate with the faithful. This Bab was expected to take the form of a
person, and as the year 1260 approached, some Shaykhis grew increasingly
excited that the Bab might be revealed in that year. When the time finally
came, some people identified a particular pious young man from Shiraz,
Seyyed Ali Mohammad, as the Bab. In May 1844 he declared that he was in-
deed the Bab and began preaching against the shortcomings of the ulema.
He advocated better treatment of women (thereby attracting many female
followers), recommended that the Islamic ban on interest be lifted, argued
that judicial punishments should be made less harsh, and urged that chil-
dren should be better treated. From one perspective his teaching looks pro-
gressive; from another it appears as little more than the conventional
teaching of the milder strand of orthodox Shi‘ism. But in 1848 the Bab and
his followers began preaching that the Bab was in fact the Hidden Emam
himself, and that their faith was a new belief—one superseding the previous
revelation of Islam. This changed the position, putting the Babis and the
ulema in direct conflict. The Bab was soon taken into custody.
One of the most remarkable and radical of the Bab’s followers was a
woman from Qazvin, Qorrat al-Ain, who discarded the veil as a sign that
shari‘a law had been set aside. She was a poet, debated theology with the
ulema, and preached the emancipation of women. She was sent into exile in
Iraq at one point, but later returned. Like the Bab, she was arrested. But un-
like him, she was still able to speak to her followers while under house arrest.
When Mohammad Shah died in 1848 his seventeen-year-old son Naser
od-Din took the throne, again with the support of the Russians and the
British. The boy was thoughtful and intelligent in appearance, with large
dark eyes and a dreamy tendency; he could lose himself for hours in books
of Persian folk tales.7
But after the accession of the new shah, there were revolts involving Babis
in Fars, Mazanderan, and in Zanjan, which were crushed by the government
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Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905–1911, and the Pahlavi Dynasty 189

with great severity. Following these disturbances, which have been linked to
social upheavals elsewhere in the world at this time, the Bab was executed in
Tabriz in 1850. The story is that the firing squad had to shoot twice, because
the first time the bullets only cut the ropes binding him, setting him free.
Animosity between the Babis and the monarchy escalated rapidly. In August
1852 three Babis tried to assassinate the new shah. Although they failed,
there was a harsh backlash. Later that same year Qorrat al-Ain was killed by
her captors, along with most of the other leaders of the movement, and the
Bab’s followers were viciously persecuted as heretics and apostates. The new
faith appeared to be a challenge to both the secular and the religious author-
ities, and as such stood little chance, despite converting quite large numbers.
Many thousands of Babis died, and others left the country.
The movement continued to grow in exile. In the 1860s it split, with a
new leader, Baha’ullah, announcing himself as the new prophet (“He
Whom God Shall Make Manifest”) predicted by the Bab. Most Babis fol-
lowed Baha’ullah, and since that time his movement has been known as the
Baha’i faith. Within Iran, Baha’is have been persecuted and killed in almost
every decade since that time.
The story of Qorrat al-Ain and her advocacy of women’s emancipation is
an important point in the history of women in Persia, and therefore for the
story of Iranian society as a whole. There are some surprises here. From our
viewpoint in the early twenty-first century, with the Islamic regime in power
in Iran and with what is often perceived (not entirely accurately) as a tradi-
tional role for women reimposed since the revolution of 1979, one might as-
sume that before the twentieth century all Iranian women were closeted at
home and never went out except when heavily veiled. But this is not at all
the case. Before the social changes brought by industrialization and urban-
ization, the structure of society was very different. Before 1900, up to half
the population were nomadic or semi-nomadic, and in such societies, tightly
integrated and often living at both the geographical and economic margins,
women’s roles were of necessity more equal and less restricted. Broadly
speaking, women oversaw the domestic arrangements while men ranged
widely looking after the flocks. But with the men away, the women had to
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190 A History of Iran

make important decisions, often as a group, and bear responsibility. When

time came to move, everyone had to take an active part.8 Traditional tribal
costumes vary enormously across Iran even today, and are often colorful and
eye-catching, with no veil in sight.
Of the remainder of the population, the majority were peasant farmers
and laborers. But among these people, too, women had an essential eco-
nomic role and some independence (insofar as anyone in the poorer classes
could properly be thought of as independent). Women had to work hard in
the fields and probably did the majority of the routine work—of all but the
heaviest sort. Again, a veil of the enveloping chador kind was normally quite
incompatible with that sort of activity.
Even in the towns and cities, the majority of people were relatively poor,
and in those households most women would have had to work outside the
home. And there were significant numbers of prostitutes, to whom the rules
of respectability certainly did not apply. So the setup we might think of as
typical—of heavily veiled women seldom leaving the home and even in the
home kept apart from males who were not relatives—was in fact atypical
before 1900. When it did occur, it was limited to middle- or high-class fam-
ilies in towns (precisely the class that looms large historically, being the
book-writing, book-reading class—perhaps only four percent or less of fam-
ilies overall). But that arrangement was, or became, an aspiration for many
men who could not afford to make it a reality. One could think of the heavy
veil as a kind of elite fetish, similar to some of the fashions of nineteenth-
century Europe that immobilized women, being wholly impractical and in-
compatible with work of any kind. For a man’s wife to be out of the house
and out of his control, especially in the towns, perhaps partly because of the
presence of prostitutes in the towns, potentially exposed him to derision and
ridicule. But for her to be kept at home and to emerge only veiled was ex-
pensive and a sign of the man’s status. It would be easy to overlook or under-
estimate the significance and implications of this trope among men in
Iranian society and elsewhere. Rather than being an outgrowth of tradi-
tional religion and society—there is little justification for it in the Qor’an or
the earliest hadith, which originated in different social circumstances—it
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Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905–1911, and the Pahlavi Dynasty 191

may largely underpin them. Possession of material goods had its patterns
and its social consequences, but so also did the possession of women.
As the population later became steadily more urban and in some ways at
least more prosperous, more women were more restricted, stayed in the home
more, and wore the heavy veil. But we should not think of those arrange-
ments as typical of pre-industrial Iran; one could accurately say that for the
majority of Iranian women, they were a twentieth-century innovation.
The conflict with the Babis around the time of Naser od-Din’s accession
was only one of the problems he had to deal with. There was a serious revolt
in Khorasan that took two years to overcome, an army mutiny in Tehran,
and serious infighting between officials at court in which the Russian and
British ambassadors both meddled, anxious that each might outdo the
other. In this confused and dangerous situation, the shah’s first minister,
Amir Kabir, attempted to steer the government in a reforming direction,
urging the shah to take a personal interest in the details of government.
Kabir’s influence over the young shah stemmed from the time he had spent
with him as Naser od-Din’s right-hand man, when Naser od-Din had been
crown prince and governor of Azerbaijan. Kabir was disliked by the Rus-
sians because they thought him to be pro-British, but the British were none
too keen on him either.9
An able and intelligent man, Amir Kabir was dedicated to the interests of
the monarchy and the country. He made a review of finances and enforced a
retrenchment in state expenditures, especially on payments and pensions to
courtiers. This inevitably made him unpopular with some members of the
court. He set up a state-funded school or polytechnic along western lines—
the Dar al-Funun, which in later years collaborated to publish translations
of Western technical books and literature—and organized a thoroughgoing
reform of the army to bring it properly up-to-date. He set about some im-
provements in agriculture, and even tried to build some factories for manu-
factured products. All this was achieved within three years, showing what
was possible and promising greater things for the future. But the thickets of
court politics proved too much for Amir Kabir. He made the mistake of try-
ing to intercede with Naser od-Din on behalf of the shah’s half-brother, an
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192 A History of Iran

effort that offended both the shah and the shah’s mother, who had signifi-
cant influence at court. In time, Amir Kabir’s critics succeeded in eroding
the shah’s confidence in him, without which he was powerless. In November
1851 Amir Kabir was dismissed as prime minister and sent to Kashan. At
the beginning of 1852 Naser od-Din, influenced by his courtiers and rela-
tives and following the precedent set by his grandfather and father before
him, had his former first minister murdered. When Amir Kabir died, so did
hope for any kind of serious push for development in Persia, at a time when
elsewhere in the world, not just in Europe, the motors of industrialization
and major structural change were accelerating.

Ugly Sisters: Russia, Britain,

and the Concessions
A new first minister, Mirza Agha Khan Nuri, took Amir Kabir’s place and
proved more to the liking of the court: he was as corrupt and reactionary as
they could have wished, and no further reform went forward. Later in the
decade the Russians gained influence, and another Persian army set out to
reconquer Herat. This time they succeeded in taking the city (in October
1856), but they also precipitated war with Britain. British troops landed at
Bushire and defeated Persian troops there, and again the Persians were
obliged to make peace. The Peace of Paris, signed in March 1857, stipulated
that Persia must abandon all claim to Afghan territory. In 1858, Nuri fell
from office, and from that time Naser od-Din Shah ruled as his own first
minister, but he never found fully satisfactory arrangements for doing so.10
Throughout this period and the decades that followed, the British and
Russians interfered so insistently in Persian government that in some re-
spects the shah’s independence appeared merely nominal. That this was not
made more obvious was only due to the shah’s unwillingness to pursue proj-
ects that might displease the European powers. He was willing to offend one
of them at any time—if he had the support of the other—but could not af-
ford to alienate both together. Thus, for example, at a time when railways—
rightly seen as the very embodiment of progress—were spreading all over
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Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905–1911, and the Pahlavi Dynasty 193

the globe, yielding benefits for communications and commerce that could
have been highly valuable for Persia too, particularly so given the huge dis-
tances and impossible roads of the Iranian plateau, no railways were built.
The British and Russians disliked the idea for strategic reasons; railways
could have delivered hostile armies more rapidly to their respective borders.
By the end of Naser od-Din’s reign in 1896 there was still only one railway
in Persia. It was a narrow-gauge line built by the Belgians, running out of
Tehran to a little shrine town five miles away—the shrine of Shah Abd ol-
Azim—which was to prove a fateful backdrop to several important events
over the next few years.11
What were the real interests of Britain and Russia in Persia at this time?
How damaging was their involvement? There are a number of different ele-
ments to these questions. Britain and Russia stood for different things in the
nineteenth century, and for different aspects of the European model. Britain
stood for, or appeared to stand for, progress, liberalism, science, commerce,
and improvement. In contrast, Russia stood for the traditional order in Eu-
rope—for the adaptation of modern tools to maintain the status quo of the
old dynastic monarchies, for the Orthodox Christian church, and against
political radicalism. Both had their attractions for different interests and
groups in Persia. But both states, whatever impression they might have
given, were primarily concerned with their own strategic interests, in which
the interests of the Persians had little part. Both had other, greater priorities.
And both loomed much larger to Persians than did Persia in the calcula-
tions of either. Each power would edge ahead of the other, if it could, but
was normally content to reach a modus vivendi with the other over Persia—
which meant stasis and avoiding surprises. This rivalry was good in one way:
it made it difficult for either power to take Persia as a colony. One could
claim that Britain prevented Russia from overwhelming Persia altogether in
the nineteenth century, and vice versa. But the negative was that both pow-
ers were suspicious of change or of vigorous Persian reformers who might
shake things up or give an advantage to their rival. As time went on, the shah
was more and more suspicious of change and reform, too. The result was
stagnation.
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194 A History of Iran

After a decade of personal rule, in 1871 the shah appointed a first minis-
ter again. This was Mirza Hosein Khan, who had served the shah overseas
as a diplomat, notably in Istanbul, where he had seen the effects of some of
the Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman Empire. Convinced that similar
change needed to happen in Persia, he encouraged Naser od-Din Shah to
travel so that he could see for himself some of the developments taking place
in other countries. In 1872 Mirza Hosein Khan succeeded in persuading the
shah to agree to what was called the Reuter concession. This was a remark-
able initiative, a blueprint for development of the most sweeping kind, in-
cluding a railway from the Caspian to the south, mining rights, and all kinds
of industrial and other economic improvements. It could have brought ben-
efits, but the trade-off was that it abandoned a huge swath of sovereign
rights to the foreigner putting up the money for those improvements: the
Baron de Reuter, a British Jew born in Germany and the founder of the
Reuters news agency. In return for the concession, the shah received £40,000
as an advance.
Over the previous decades, the Iranian economy had changed and shifted
in response to an increasing penetration of markets by foreigners. Many Ira-
nian products proved unable to compete with cheap imports, while agricul-
ture began producing more for export (cotton and opium, for example). The
reduced capacity for domestic food production contributed to a number of
severe famines, especially in 1870–1871, in which it has been estimated that
up to one-tenth of the population perished.12 The changes left many people
angry and contributed to the opposition to the Reuter concession. The shah
returned from a visit to Europe in 1873 to powerful demands for the re-
moval of Mirza Hosein Khan, and he duly went.
The Reuter concession was also strongly disliked by the Russians, and
the shah had discovered while in Europe that the British were no better
than lukewarm about it. Along with the domestic opposition, this was
enough for the shah to find an excuse to cancel it in the same year. But there
followed an extended dispute over the advance, which the shah held on to.
Eventually, in 1889, Baron de Reuter was given another concession in com-
pensation—he was allowed to set up the Imperial Bank of Persia, with the
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Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905–1911, and the Pahlavi Dynasty 195

exclusive right to print paper currency. Up to that time, the British were able
to use the Reuter dispute to prevent Russian proposals for a railway from
going ahead. But in 1879 the Russians helped the shah set up the Iranian
Cossack Brigade, which was led by Russian officers. This became the most
modern, best-disciplined armed force in the country, and was loyal to the
shah—but it was also an instrument of Russian influence.
For a period in the 1870s, the British government considered a more pos-
itive attitude toward Persia, which could have resulted in Persia becoming a
genuine ally rather than a dupe and a cat’s-paw.13 This episode was prompted
by Russian conquests in Central Asia—notably the surrender to them of
Khiva in 1873—but also by the deterioration of British influence in Af-
ghanistan. In 1879 the foreign secretary Lord Salisbury, briefly setting aside
the policy of “masterly inactivity” governing Britain’s attitude to the borders
of India, considered a plan that would have given Herat to Naser od-Din
Shah, along with a subsidy from the British government and help with in-
ternal reforms. Persia would have become a partner and an ally, an essential
element in Britain’s colonial defenses rather than a theater for spoiling ac-
tions to prevent the Russians gaining influence. It would have been in
Britain’s interests to help build up Persia, rather than keeping Persia down.
Talks went on between the British and the Persians in London, led on the
Persian side by Malkom Khan, head of the Persian diplomatic mission
there. But in the end Naser od-Din Shah broke off the negotiations. The
British believed that this was because the Russians had intervened to block
them. The liberal government that followed was not inclined to take up the
talks again, and the opportunity was lost, but the episode shows that the
realpolitik pursued by Britain vis-à-vis Persia was not necessarily the in-
evitable and logical corollary to their imperial position. A cynical policy, or a
policy of realpolitik as its proponents would call it, may sometimes be pur-
sued out of laziness and lack of imagination rather than anything else. The
cynical policy maker cannot predict the future any more than the moralist
can, but he knows that at least he cannot be accused of starry-eyed idealism.
Sometimes that edge is all it takes to allow the cynic to dominate. Truly far-
sighted politicians sometimes insist that if you get the principles right, then
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196 A History of Iran

the small change of policy will look after itself. But often the principles get
lost along the way, and cynicism and short-termism prevail. The cynicism of
British policy in Persia was to do great damage in the longer term.
Malkom Khan was a significant figure in the latter part of the nineteenth
century. He was born in 1833, the son of an Armenian father who had con-
verted to Islam, and who had so admired Sir John Malcolm that he named
his son after him. Malkom Khan was educated in Paris, and on his return to
Persia taught at the Dar al-Funun. But the shah became suspicious of his re-
forming ideas and his influence, and his later service as a diplomat outside
Iran had something of the character of exile. Eventually, at the end of the
1880s, Malkom Khan fell from favor altogether. He stayed on in London to
produce the newspaper Qanun, which pressed for an end to arbitrary govern-
ment and for the establishment of the rule of law, based on a constitution.
This paper was distributed in Iran and was widely read among the educated
elite. After Naser od-Din’s death, Malkom Khan was reconciled to the gov-
ernment. He died in 1908.
Reform-minded officials continued to come and go in Persia through the
1880s, but without the full support of the shah they were unable to get any
traction. The shah continued to negotiate concessions to foreigners, but in
1890 he went too far with a tobacco concession, granting monopoly rights to
a British company that enabled them to buy, sell, and export tobacco with-
out competition. This drew opposition from a formidable alliance of oppo-
nents: landlords and tobacco growers, who found themselves forced to sell at
a fixed price; bazaar traders, who saw themselves once more frozen out of a lu-
crative sector of the economy; the readership of new reform- and nationalist-
oriented newspapers operating from overseas; and the ulema, who were
closely aligned to the bazaar traders and disliked the foreign presence in the
country. This combination of interests became the classic pattern, repeated
in later movements. Coordinated largely through the network of connec-
tions between the mullahs across the country (making use of the new tele-
graph system), mass protests against the concession took place in most of
the major cities in 1891. They culminated in something like a revolt in
Tabriz and a demonstration in Tehran that was fired on by troops, leading
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Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905–1911, and the Pahlavi Dynasty 197

to further demonstrations. One of the most important mojtaheds, Hajji

Mirza Hasan Shirazi, issued a fatwa in December 1891 calling for a nation-
wide boycott, and this was so widely obeyed that even the shah’s wives
stopped smoking. Early in 1892 the government was forced to cancel the
concession, incurring a large debt.
Naser od-Din was bruised by the furor over the tobacco concession.
From around this time onward, the Russian interest tended to predominate
at court, and the shah followed a more repressive policy, restricting contacts
with Europe, banning the Persian-language newspapers imported from
overseas, limiting the expansion of education that he had earlier champi-
oned, and again favoring reactionary, anti-reform ministers. Some contem-
porary observers apparently said the shah now preferred courtiers who did
not know whether Brussels was a place or a vegetable.14

Jamal al-Din al-Afghani

By the latter part of the nineteenth century some thinkers in Iran, and in the
Middle East more generally, had gone from an initial response to the West
of bafflement, reactionary resentment, or uncritical admiration to adapta-
tion, resistance, or reform. Notable among these was Jamal al-Din al-
Afghani, who despite his name was probably born in Iran and brought up as
a Shi‘a in the 1830s and 1840s. Later he traveled widely, including in India,
Afghanistan, Europe, and Egypt, and he lived in Egypt for some years in the
1870s. It is thought that he adopted the name al-Afghani in order to be ac-
cepted more easily in a Sunni milieu. In all these places he attracted a fol-
lowing for his strong resistance to European influences. Al-Afghani was
energetic and charismatic, with a talent for getting access to powerful people
in a variety of countries. But he also tended to be bumptious and seems to
have disliked women.
More specifically, al-Afghani opposed British influence, whether in Af-
ghanistan, Egypt, Sudan, or Iran. He was more ambivalent about the Rus-
sians. He wanted to see a revival in the Islamic world and believed that the
message of Islam had to be revised in the light of reason, to adapt to different
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198 A History of Iran

conditions in different times. He asserted that there was nothing inconsis-

tent between Islam and reform, or Islam and science. The scientific and
technological achievements of the West could be equaled or surpassed by a
science based on Islam. But al-Afghani’s attitude even to Islam was ambiva-
lent, and his message was different for different audiences at different times.
There are undercurrents of Shaykhism and mysticism in his thinking that
probably reflect his traditional education. Yet he was a politician and a prag-
matist rather than an ascetic or religious dogmatist, and he did not have a
reputation for personal holiness. His flirtations with various contemporary
governments in Islamic countries usually ended badly, but he became a ma-
jor influence on later thinkers of Islamism—especially in Egypt and in
Iran—though his ideas were too boldly innovative to be accepted by the
classically trained ulema, whether Shi‘a or Sunni.15
Al-Afghani returned to Iran in the 1880s at the invitation of the shah,
but when they met there was no meeting of minds. Al-Afghani’s ideas were
too strongly anti-British for the shah, at least at that stage. Al-Afghani left
again and returned again, but was eventually forced out of the country—to
Iraq, in 1891—after pamphlets appeared, apparently under his influence, at-
tacking concessions to foreigners.
From Iraq, al-Afghani was an influence in the campaign against the to-
bacco concession, corresponding in particular with the mojtahed Hajji
Mirza Hasan Shirazi before the cleric ordered the tobacco boycott. Al-
Afghani was active thereafter with the two main Persian newspapers printed
overseas, Qanun and Akhtar, published in London and Istanbul, respectively.
While he was in Istanbul in 1895, he was visited by a Persian ex-prisoner
called Mirza Reza Kermani. They discussed future plans, and Kermani later
returned to Iran. On May 1, 1896, Kermani shot and killed Naser od-Din
Shah, having approached him with a petition while the shah was visiting the
shrine of Shah Abd ol-Azim. Naser od-Din was buried there shortly after-
ward. Kermani was executed by public hanging the following August, and
Al-Afghani died of cancer in 1897.
One aspect of the assassination illustrates the complexity of attitudes to-
ward Jews in Iran. Apparently in his interrogation Kermani said that he had
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Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905–1911, and the Pahlavi Dynasty 199

had an earlier opportunity to kill the shah, while he was walking in a park,
and had not done so—despite the fact that he could easily have escaped be-
cause he knew that a number of Jews had been in the park that day and that
they would be blamed for the killing. Kermani did not want the assassination
to be blamed on the Jews and did not want to be responsible for the riots and
attacks on Jews that might follow.16 For every anti-Semitic preacher or rabble-
rouser, there were many educated, humane Iranians—clerics and others—
for whom it was a matter of conscience to do what they could to help the
Jews and other minorities, irrespective of the radicalism that might character-
ize their other beliefs.
The sudden death of the shah could have brought disorder and confu-
sion. But for a time courtiers were able to conceal what had happened, and
the Cossack Brigade kept order in Tehran until Naser od-Din’s appointed
successor, his son Mozaffar od-Din, could arrive from Tabriz and assume
the throne.

The Slide to Revolution

Mozaffar od-Din was sick when he became shah and was surrounded by a
gaggle of greedy courtiers and hangers-on. They had waited a long time with
him in Tabriz for their chance to take over in Tehran, and the shah did not
have the energy or force of personality to keep them in check. Initially he
had a reforming prime minister, Amin od-Dowleh, who was especially active
in improving education. He opened many new schools, including schools for
girls. Censorship was lifted, and the shah permitted the formation of cul-
tural and educational associations. Most of this new activity was indepen-
dent of the state and had little financial cost to the government. But this
shah had to pay more for the court than his father had, in addition to his
own frequent and expensive trips to Europe for medical treatment. With the
exception of the debt incurred after the cancellation of the tobacco conces-
sion, Naser od-Din had succeeded in keeping the state finances in order. But
state debt accumulated under Mozaffar od-Din Shah, necessitating new
loans from the Russians and the granting of new monopolistic concessions.
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200 A History of Iran

One of Prime Minister Amin od-Dowleh’s money-raising innovations was

the introduction of Belgian customs administrators, but in 1898 the shah
dismissed him after he failed to secure a British loan. A new prime minister,
Amin ol-Sultan, came in and set up Joseph Naus, a Belgian, as customs min-
ister. As time went on Naus effectively became finance minister.17
The new customs arrangements were unpopular with many bazaar mer-
chants, who seemed to be paying more than before—and also more than
foreign traders. Not only that, they were paying the money to foreigners.
The Russian loans were unpopular. The ulema disliked the new schools,
which weakened their traditional grip on education. They also took a dim
view of the shah’s trips to Europe. The lifting of censorship and the freedom
to form associations made criticism of the government easier and more pub-
lic. This gratified the inclinations of a new intelligentsia, a diverse mix of lib-
eral, nationalist, socialist, and Islamic reformist elements, all of whom
tended to be hostile to the monarchy for different or overlapping reasons. It
was a time of change and ferment, but also resentment and unease.
Among other concessions granted around this time, for fisheries and
other rights, was one in 1901 to another British entrepreneur, William Knox
D’Arcy. This concession was to prove much more important than was ap-
parent initially: he was allowed to explore the southern part of the country
for oil.
The British, feeling their loss of the latest round in The Great Game, de-
cided in 1902/1903 to liaise with some members of the ulema, notably Aya-
tollah Abdollah Behbehani, to oppose the customs arrangements, including
the Belgian administrators and the Russian loans. Money changed hands.
There was agitation by the ulema in several cities, but it turned against for-
eigners and non-Muslims in general. Riots in Isfahan and Yazd in the sum-
mer of 1903 led to the killing of several Baha’is, and there were attacks on
Jews and Christian minorities, too.
The following year the harvest was bad. Next, the outbreak of the Russo-
Japanese war, followed by the 1905 revolution in Russia, interrupted imports
from the north and made them more expensive. The significance of the out-
come of the war, in which the Japanese inflicted a humiliating defeat on the
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Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905–1911, and the Pahlavi Dynasty 201

Russians (with the help of British-built battleships), was eagerly taken in by

Iranian intellectuals, for whom it demonstrated that the dominance of the
imperialist Europeans was not unshakeable. Meanwhile, the disruption of
commerce meant that in northern cities like Tabriz and Tehran wheat prices
in the early months of 1905 went up by ninety percent, and sugar prices
went up by thirty-three percent. The government was hit hard, fiscally, be-
cause its customs revenues went down. The shah tried to secure another
Russian loan and was offered £350,000, but the condition was that he
should accept Russian commanders to lead all of his military units. Reject-
ing these terms, the shah instead raised internal tariffs and postponed pay-
ments to local creditors, increasing yet further the pressure on the bazaar
merchants.18 The government’s financial problems also meant that the
salaries of some ulema went unpaid.
In Tehran in June 1905 there was a demonstration in the mourning
month of Moharram that fused economic and religious elements in a way
that was to become typical. Two hundred shopkeepers and moneylenders
closed their businesses and walked to the shrine of Shah Abd ol-Azim,
protesting against the latest damaging government measures and demand-
ing the removal of Monsieur Naus, the Belgian customs chief. The demon-
strators passed around offensive pictures of Naus dressed as a mullah at a
fancy-dress party. The shah, still sick and suffering, talked to the protestors
and promised to satisfy their demands when he came back from his immi-
nent trip to Europe. But this did not happen, and a more serious protest
broke out in December 1905 after two sugar merchants from the Tehran
bazaar were given beatings on the feet at the orders of the governor of
Tehran; their offense had been charging too much for sugar. One of the men
was a revered elder of the bazaar who had paid to repair the bazaar and
three mosques. His protests—that he was not profiteering and that the
prices were high because of the situation in Russia—availed him nothing.
Again the bazaar closed, and this time two thousand or more merchants,
religious students, ulema, and others went—led by the mojtaheds Behbehani
and Seyyed Mohammad Tabataba’i—to the shrine of Shah Abd ol-Azim
and took sanctuary there.
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202 A History of Iran

From the shrine they issued their demands: removal of the governor who
had ordered the beatings, enforcement of shari‘a law, dismissal of Naus, and
the establishment of a representative assembly or adalatkhaneh (House of
Justice). Initially the government was defiant. But the bazaar stayed closed,
and after a month the shah dismissed the governor and accepted the protes-
tors’ demands.
But there was no attempt to convene the House of Justice in the follow-
ing months. Further street protests occurred in the summer of 1906, after
the government had tried to take action against some radical preachers, and
one of them—a seyyed, someone believed to be descended from the Prophet
Mohammad—was shot dead by the police. This killing created a huge up-
roar. Ayatollahs Behbehani and Tabataba’i, accompanied by two thousand
ulema and their students, left Tehran for Qom (then as now the main center
for theological study in the country), and a larger group of merchants, mul-
lahs, and others took sanctuary at the grounds of the summer residence of
the British legation at Golhak, then north of Tehran. The British chargé d’af-
faires respected the Persian tradition of sanctuary, or bast, and the numbers
there eventually reached fourteen thousand. Their accommodation and
other needs were organized by the bazaar merchants’ guilds. This meant
that both the ulema and the bazaar were on strike, which effectively brought
the capital to a standstill. Meanwhile, the Golhak compound became a
hotbed of political discussion and speculation, with liberal and nationalist
intellectuals joining in and addressing the assembled crowds. Many of these
began to speak of the need to limit the powers of the shah by establishing a
constitution (mashruteh), and the demand for a House of Justice became
more specific, shifting to a call for a properly representative national assem-
bly. Coordinated by the ulema, similar groups from the provinces sent many
telegrams to the shah in support of these demands.

Mashruteh
On August 5, 1906, nearly a month after the first protestors took refuge in
Golhak—and menaced by a potential mutiny among the Cossack Brigade,
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Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905–1911, and the Pahlavi Dynasty 203

whom the shah had been unable to pay—Mozaffar od-Din Shah gave in
and signed an order for the convening of a national assembly, or Majles. It
convened for the first time in October 1906 and rapidly set about drafting a
constitution, the central structure of which took the form of what were
called the Fundamental Laws. They were ratified by Mozaffar od-Din Shah
on December 30, and he died only five days later. The creation of a constitu-
tion was a major event, not just in Iranian history but also in regional and
world history. In the 1870s in Turkey, a movement often called the Young
Ottomans had established a kind of national assembly in an attempt to re-
cast the Ottoman Empire as a constitutional monarchy, but the experiment
had only lasted for a couple of years. The constitutional movement in Iran
had a more enduring effect, and even though its revolution is often described
as a failure, the Majles survived, and the movement’s achievements influ-
enced events throughout the rest of the twentieth century. And the initial
success of the revolution was achieved by peaceful, dignified protest—almost
wholly without bloodshed.
The Majles was elected on the basis of partial suffrage, on a two-stage sys-
tem, and represented primarily the middle and upper classes that had
headed the protests in the first place. The electors were landowners (only
above a middling size), ulema and theological students, and merchants and
bazaar-guild members with businesses of average size or above. In each re-
gion, these electors chose delegates to regional assemblies, and those dele-
gates nominated the 156 Majles members (except in Tehran where they
were elected directly). Numerically, the Majles was dominated by the bazaar
merchants and guild elders, and it divided roughly into liberal, moderate,
and royalist groupings—of which the moderates were the most numerous
by a large margin. Ayatollahs Behbehani and Tabataba’i supported the mod-
erates but were not themselves Majles members. Outside the Majles, both in
the capital and in the regional centers, the elections stimulated the creation
of further political societies (anjoman), some of which grew powerful and in-
fluenced the deliberations of the Majles itself. Some of these societies repre-
sented occupations, others regions like Azerbaijan, and still others ethnic or
religious groups like the Jews and Armenians. There were political societies
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204 A History of Iran

for women for the first time. A great upsurge in political activity and debate
took place across the country, resulting in an expansion of the number of
newspapers—from just six before the revolution to more than one hun-
dred.19 This upsurge was disturbing to the more tradition minded, especially
the more conservative members of the ulema.
The Majles expected to govern, and to govern on new principles. The con-
stitution (which remained formally in force until 1979, and was based on the
Belgian constitution) stated explicitly that the shah’s sovereignty derived
from the people, as a power given to him in trust, not as a right bestowed di-
rectly by God. The power of the ulema, and their frame of thought, was also
manifest in the constitution. Shi‘ism was declared to be the state religion,
shari‘a law was recognized, clerical courts were given a significant role, and
there was to be a five-man committee of senior ulema to scrutinize legislation
passed by the Majles, to confirm its spiritual legitimacy (that is, until the
reappearance of the Hidden Emam, whose proper responsibility this was).
But the civil rights of non-Shi‘a minorities were also protected, reflecting the
involvement of many Jews, Babis, Armenians, and others in the constitu-
tional project. Jews and Armenians had their own protected seats for their
representatives in the Majles (though the first Jewish representative with-
drew after encountering anti-Semitism from other members of the Majles,
and the Jews thereafter chose Behbehani to represent them—another impor-
tant example of a mojtahed sympathetic to the Jewish minority20).
All revolutions are about movement and change—that is obvious. They
are also about leadership. The Constitutional Revolution marked the ef-
fective end of the Qajar era of government, and promised to usher in a
period of government under more regular, legitimate, modern principles.
Instead, for a variety of reasons, many of which had nothing to do with the
revolution itself, it inaugurated a period of conflict and uncertainty. It was
still a major change, a watershed. But in addition to that kind of change,
most revolutions bring their own dynamic of change within the human
groupings and systems of values involved in the revolution. The players in
the revolution find their expectations, assumptions, and illusions chal-
lenged and, in some cases, subverted or overturned by the progress of the
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Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905–1911, and the Pahlavi Dynasty 205

revolution itself. As with other revolutions, notably the French, the Con-
stitutional Revolution in Iran provided a playground for the law of unin-
tended consequences.
The prime revolutionary classes were the ulema and the bazaari mer-
chants, whose motivations, if not their mode of expressing them, were at
root conservative. They wanted the removal of foreign interference and a
restoration of traditional patterns of commerce and religious authority. In
the earliest phase of the revolution, the ulema were in charge. It was their au-
thority that gave the protests authority, and it was their hierarchy and their
system of relationships that organized and coordinated the protest. But once
the protesters were installed in the British legation, it was a question of
“where next,” and the ulema had no clear answer. The simple removal of
ministers and objectionable Qajar initiatives was plainly not enough; the
shah’s good faith could not be relied upon, and previous protests had failed
to secure future good behavior. The call for a constitution was not just for a
vague construct, the pet project of Westernizers; it was manifest that the
country needed to commit itself to a permanent change of direction more
definitive than anything tried before. The constitution really was an idea
whose time had arrived—even the leaders of the ulema initially embraced it,
despite its being clearly a Western-inspired idea. But their acceptance,
whether or not they realized it straightaway, effectively handed over the ini-
tiative, and therefore the leadership, to the owners of the constitutional idea:
the liberals and nationalists whose models were secular and Western. Many
of these men were members of the state bureaucracy and were spiritual heirs
of Amir Kabir. They were eager for reform of the state along Western lines,
especially the state’s finances, but also its education and justice systems. One
could think of them as a new intelligentsia, suddenly grown into importance
to rival the traditional intelligentsia, the ulema. They were to be found dis-
proportionally among the Majles delegates from Azerbaijan and Tabriz,
and one of their most prominent leaders, Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh, was
from that region. Their agenda extended beyond just a constitution. It soon
became increasingly clear to many ulema that the revolution was taking a
direction they had neither anticipated nor wanted.
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206 A History of Iran

Mozaffar od-Din Shah’s successor was his son Mohammad Ali Shah,
whose instincts were more autocratic than those of his father. Although he
took an oath of loyalty to the constitution, he was resolved from the start to
overturn it and restore the previous form of untrammeled monarchy.
Through 1907 and the first half of 1908 the Majles passed measures for the
reform of taxation and finance, as well as education and judicial matters.
The latter were particularly disturbing to the ulema, because they saw their
traditional role encroached upon.
The figure of Shaykh Fazlollah Nuri symbolized the change of mind
among many of the ulema and their followers at this time. Nuri had been a
prominent Tehrani mojtahed in 1905, supporting the protests of
1905–1906. But by 1907 he was arguing that the Majles and its plans were
leading away from the initial aims of the protesters—that it was unaccept-
able that sacred law should be tampered with. It was also unacceptable
that other religious groups be treated equally with Muslims before the law,
and that the constitutionalists were importing “the customs and practices
of the abode of unbelief ” (i.e., the West). At one point Nuri led a group of
supporters into bast at the shrine of Shah Abd ol-Azim. From there his at-
tacks on the constitutionalists grew stronger, and he expressed open sup-
port for the monarchy against the Majles, which he denounced as
illegitimate. He also railed against Jews, Bahais, and Zoroastrians, exag-
gerating their part in the constitutionalist movement. A group of clerics
sent telegrams supporting him from the theological center in Najaf.21
Other mojtaheds, like Tabataba’i, were more willing to accept Western
ideas into the framework of political structures that were to govern human
affairs in the absence of the Hidden Emam. But it is probably also fair to
say that Nuri understood better than many of the ulema the direction that
constitutionalism was leading, and from his perspective, the dangers of it.
The general ferment of ideas precipitated by the revolution and the years
of dissent before it had affected the ulema too. The ulema had never been
a united bloc of opinion (no more than any group of intellectuals ever is).
Eventually, another leading cleric, Khorasani, attacked Nuri from Najaf,
declaring him to be a non-Muslim.
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Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905–1911, and the Pahlavi Dynasty 207

Just as the fighting around Troy in the Iliad is paralleled by the disputes of
the gods on Mount Olympus, so the struggle between radicals and conserva-
tives in Tehran was paralleled by a struggle between the mojtaheds in Najaf.
Before 1906, the most eminent of these—the marja, or religious role model,
for many Shi‘a Muslims—was Mohammad Kazem Khorasani, who had
supported the constitution and the line taken by Tabataba’i when the revo-
lution came. But the ferment caused among the ulema by the revolution was
such that as Nuri came to prominence in Tehran, Khorasani lost ground to
a more conservative rival, Seyyed Mohammad Kazem Yazdi. This shift took
concrete form at prayer: followers sat behind their chosen marja, and one ac-
count says that when the struggle was at its height only thirty or so still
prayed behind Khorasani, while several thousand took their place behind
Yazdi. Later on there was rioting in Najaf between the supporters of the dif-
ferent factions.22
In June 1908 the shah, deciding that feeling had moved far enough in his
direction for him to act, launched the Cossack Brigade in an attack against
the Majles. The troops fired shells at the building until the delegates gave in,
and the assembly was closed. Many leading members were arrested and exe-
cuted, while others, like Taqizadeh, escaped overseas. The shah’s coup was
successful in Tehran, but not in all the provinces. In Tabriz, delegates from
the constitutionalist regional assembly and their supporters (notably the
charismatic ex-brigand Sattar Khan) successfully held the city against the
royal governor and his forces.
In 1907, newly allied to each other and to France, and concerned at Ger-
many’s burgeoning overseas presence, Britain and Russia had finally com-
pounded their mutual suspicions and reached a treaty over their interests in
Persia. The treaty showed no respect for the new conditions of popular sov-
ereignty in the country, showing that the apparent British protection of the
revolutionaries in their legation in 1906 had had little real significance. This
new treaty divided Persia into three zones: a zone of Russian influence in
the north, including Tabriz, Tehran, Mashhad, and Isfahan—most of the
major cities; a British zone in the southeast, adjacent to the border with
British India; and a neutral zone in the middle.
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208 A History of Iran

One consequence of the treaty was that the Russians, intolerant as ever of
any form of popular movement, felt obliged to send in troops to restore Qa-
jar rule in Tabriz after the shah’s coup of June 1908. But some of the revolu-
tionaries were able to escape to Gilan and continue their resistance with
other locals there. In July 1909 they made a move on Tehran, coordinated
with a move from the south, where revolutionaries in Isfahan had allied
themselves with the Bakhtiari tribe and successfully taken over that city.
Mohammad Ali Shah fled to the Russian legation, was deposed, and went
into exile in Russia. He was replaced by his young son, Ahmad, though Ah-
mad was not crowned until July 1914.
The constitutionalists were back in control once more, but the revolution
had entered a new, more dangerous phase. A new Majles came in (on a new
electoral law, which yielded a more conservative assembly), but the divisions
between the radicals and the conservatives had deepened. The violence that
had reinstated the revolution also had its effect—many of the armed groups
that had retaken the capital stayed on there. Several prominent Bakhtiaris
took office in the government. The ulema were divided and many sided with
the royalists, effectively rejecting the whole project of constitutionalism. But
within a few days the leader of the conservative ulema, Nuri, was arrested,
tried, and hanged for his alleged connections with the coup of June 1908.
There were a series of assassinations carried out by both wings of political
opinion—Behbehani was killed, and later Sattar Khan. The radicals—the
democratic party in the Majles—found themselves denounced by bazaar
crowds as heretics and traitors, and some of them, including Taqizadeh,
were forced into exile. Rumors ran around that there was a Babi conspiracy
behind the democrats, and there were attacks on the Jews—in Kermanshah
in 1909, and Shiraz in 1910, instigated as usual by preachers and marginal
mullahs. A later, serious riot against the Jews in Tehran in 1922 was put
down by Reza Khan.23 There was disorder in many provinces. It became im-
possible to collect taxation, tribal leaders took over in some areas, and brig-
ands became commonplace. To try to address this, and to redress the
influence of the Russian-officered Cossack Brigade, the Majles set up a gen-
darmerie trained by Swedish officers.
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Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905–1911, and the Pahlavi Dynasty 209

Prince Charming
Pushing forward despite these storms, the government appointed a young
American, Morgan Schuster, as financial adviser. Schuster presented clear-
sighted, wide-ranging proposals that addressed law and order and the gov-
ernment’s control of the provinces, as well as more narrowly financial
matters, and he began to put them into effect. Fulfilling Iranian (or at least
some Iranian) aspirations in ways that British realpolitik had disappointed
them, the United States in this phase looked like the partner Iran had long
hoped to find in the West—antifeudal, anticolonial, modern, but not impe-
rialist—a truly benevolent foreign power that would, for once, treat Iran
with respect, as an agent in her own right, not as an instrument. People have
suggested that there are only a limited number of stories in literature and
folklore—that all the great variety ever told can be reduced to just a handful
of archetypal plots. If that is so, and if we think of the British and the Rus-
sians in the nineteenth century as the ugly sisters, then at this time Morgan
Schuster and his United States looked like Prince Charming. But the story
was not to have a happy ending.
The Russians objected to Schuster’s appointment of a British officer to
head up a new gendarmerie, for tax collection, on the basis that it should not
have been made within their sphere of influence without their consent, and
the British acquiesced with their uglier sister. Schuster assessed, probably
correctly, that the deeper Russian motive was to keep the Persian govern-
ment’s affairs in a state of financial bankruptcy, and thus in a position of rel-
ative weakness (as supplicant for Russian loans), the better to manipulate
them. Any determined effort to put the government of Persia on a sound fi-
nancial footing, as Schuster’s reforms threatened to do, was a threat to Rus-
sian interests. The Russians presented an ultimatum: Schuster had to go. A
group of women surged into the Majles to demand that the ultimatum be
rejected, and the Majles agreed with them, insisting that the American
should stay. But the Russians sent troops to Tehran and as they drew near,
the Bakhtiaris and conservatives in the cabinet enacted what has been called
a coup, and dismissed both Schuster and the Majles in December 1911.24
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210 A History of Iran

Schuster later wrote a book about his time in Iran called The Strangling of
Persia, in which, despite what today reads sometimes with a rather prosy,
evangelical style, he expressed his admiration for the moral courage and de-
termination of the people he worked with in the period of the Constitu-
tional Revolution. The book explains much about the revolution, and about
Persia at the time. But it also illuminates Schuster’s attitudes about the
country and the reasons he and, by extension, the United States were so
highly regarded by Iranians. He wrote of the Majles that it

. . . more truly represented the best aspirations of the Persians than any other
body that had ever existed in that country. It was as representative as it could
be under the difficult circumstances which surround the institution of the
Constitutional Government. It was loyally supported by the great mass of the
Persians, and that alone was sufficient justification for its existence. The Rus-
sian and British Governments, however, were constantly instructing their
Ministers at Teheran to obtain this concession or to block that one, failing ut-
terly to recognise that the days had passed in which the affairs, lives and inter-
ests of twelve millions of people were entirely in the hands of an easily
intimidated and willingly bribed despot.25

It would be incorrect to put all the blame for the outcome of the Consti-
tutional Revolution onto the foreigners. The revolution had brought for-
ward violence and rancor between the groups represented in the Majles, and
the divisions contributed to the events of December 1911. One could specu-
late, not least on the basis of the use of terror by other revolutionaries in
other revolutions, that if the revolution had not been cut off at that point,
the violence might well have gotten a great deal worse, possibly with very
damaging long-term effects. But that is to speculate too far. We do not know
how it would have turned out. Revolutions may have family resemblances,
but they have no timetable and no blueprint, and the Constitutional Revo-
lution arose out of distinctive and unique political and social circumstances.
There were, on the other hand, many positive elements in the situation as it
was before December 1911 above all that at last, as Schuster pointed out,
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Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905–1911, and the Pahlavi Dynasty 211

the country had a truly popular government, and that it was addressing as a
priority the fundamental problem of the fiscal structures. Revolutionaries
and people showed a strong solidarity against external meddling, a powerful
enthusiasm for constitutional government, and for their elected Majles. This
enthusiasm had been strong enough to overturn one coup already, and was
strong enough to sustain the principles of constitutionalism later, too, no-
tably in 1919–1920. It gives the lie to those who condescendingly suggest
that Iran, or Middle Eastern countries in general, are somehow culturally
unsuited to constitutional, representative, or (later) democratic government.
When those forms of government were offered, Iranians grabbed them with
both hands, as other peoples invariably have in other times and places.

Persia, Oil, Battleships, and the

First World War
Through this period, even before the British legation had been used for
sanctuary by the protesters in 1906, new developments had been at work to
reshape Britain’s attitude to Iran. Since at least the turn of the century,
Britain’s traditional rivalries with France and Russia had been replaced by an
awareness of the danger of the growing power and belligerence of Germany.
France and Russia allied with each other (by implication, against Germany)
in 1894; Britain and France allied in 1904; and Britain, France, and Russia
allied all together in 1907 (the Triple Entente). Particularly sharp for Britain
was the German program of naval shipbuilding over this period. Since the
Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, Britain had maintained an unrivaled dominance
of the world’s oceans—an essential support to her world empire. But under
Emperor Wilhelm II the Germans began building modern warships at a
rapid rate, threatening the Royal Navy’s dominance. British shipyards began
to turn out ships to match the German program. In 1906 the British
launched HMS Dreadnought, which was said to have rendered all previous
warships obsolete by its combination of speed and the coordinated fire-
power of its simplified armament. In 1912 the British navy switched from
coal to oil as fuel; oil burned more efficiently and was less bulky. But whereas
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212 A History of Iran

Britain had huge domestic reserves of coal, oil had to be sought elsewhere.
Under the terms of the D’Arcy concession, large quantities of oil had been
discovered—the first oil to be found in the Middle East—in 1908 near Ah-
waz in Khuzestan, in southwest Iran.
Persia had for decades been of importance to Britain for the sake of the
northwest frontier of India, perhaps of declining importance, especially after
the Triple Entente. But now the oil reserves of Khuzestan became vital for
the security of the whole British Empire. Britain’s sphere of influence ac-
cording to the agreement with Russia was quickly extended westward to in-
clude the rest of the Persian Gulf coast and the oil fields. The Anglo-Persian
Oil Company was formed to exploit the oil, and in 1914 the British govern-
ment bought up a majority share in it.
Partly because of the oil, but also because Britain’s rivals fell away one by
one over the following years, Britain gradually became the dominant exter-
nal power in Iran in the decade that followed 1911. It was a period of deep-
ening chaos, poverty, and suffering. The Russians fired on revolutionaries in
several of the cities in their northern zone in the aftermath of the coup of
December 1911, notably in Mashhad. There protesters took sanctuary in
the shrine of the Emam Reza, only for the Russian artillery to shell the
shrine itself—an act of sacrilege and humiliation that was deeply felt
throughout the country. The British Embassy reported in 1914 that the cen-
tral government had little influence on events outside Tehran.26 The British
and the Russians exercised a degree of control in their respective zones, but
their grip was far from absolute. This was shown by the success of the Jangali
movement in Gilan (Jangal means forest, an allusion to the dense forests of
the Caspian coast) under the charismatic leader Kuchek Khan, which con-
tinued to sustain some of the spirit of independence that had inspired the
revolution.
The revolution is usually said to have ended in 1911, but this date is
rather artificial. The constitution established by the revolution was not over-
turned, and a new Majles convened in December 1914. The spirit of the rev-
olution and the ideals and expectations of the constitutionalists were not
crushed. They resurfaced again and again in the events that followed. The
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Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905–1911, and the Pahlavi Dynasty 213

revolution was a watershed in the history of Iran, as the episode in which

previously more or less inchoate strands of thinking and opinion came to-
gether in concrete political form, shifted, changed, and acquired permanent
significance. It also had, with the focus of popular debate in Tehran and the
role of regional assemblies in sending delegates to the Majles, a centralizing
and unifying effect, strengthening the nationalist sympathies of many of
those delegates. The revolts in Gilan, and later Azerbaijan, had national, not
separatist aims. There could be no going back to the pre-1906 state of
things.
During the First World War, despite the government’s declaration that
Persia was neutral, the country was divided up by the different players that
maintained troops in different sectors. There were the Russians in the north,
but also the Jangalis. In Tehran there were the troops controlled, at least
nominally, by the government—the Cossack Brigade and the Swedish gen-
darmerie. Set against the Russians were the Ottomans and their allies, the
Germans. The Ottomans made an incursion into the country in the west
and north. For the most part none of these armed elements was strong
enough to control large areas of territory or to establish overall supremacy.
Most of the fighting was low in intensity and indecisive. But in the north-
west the Ottomans and the Russians fought each other more aggressively,
doing much damage to the villages and the local population. A revived rump
of the constitutionalist movement was set up under Ottoman and German
protection in Kermanshah, and for a period in 1915 prospects for this move-
ment looked good. The Ottomans were doing well in the north, and the
Germans, who were allied with the Qashqai and others in the south, also
made considerable progress. The British pulled out of their consulates in
Hamadan, Isfahan, Yazd, and Kerman.
But in the south the British set up a force called the South Persia Rifles
in the spring of 1916, primarily to protect the oil fields. They also had a
close relationship with the Bakhtiari, as well as with some of the Arab
tribes of Khuzestan and those of the Khamseh confederation. Despite the
skillful guerrilla war masterminded by the brilliant German adventurer
Wilhelm Wassmuss, who has been compared to Lawrence of Arabia, the
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214 A History of Iran

British slowly regained the upper hand, and the situation in Iran, as in the
wider war, turned against the Germans and the Ottomans. This was de-
spite the Russians and their troops being removed from the equation after
the October revolution of 1917. By the time of the armistice in November
1918, Wassmuss was captured near Isfahan, and the British were resurgent
in Persia.
At the end of the war, the country was in a terrible state. There had been
a severe famine in the years 1917 and 1918, partly as a result of the disloca-
tion of trade and agricultural production caused by the war. The effect of
the Russian Revolution on trade was devastating. Before 1914, sixty-five
percent of foreign trade had been with Russia, but this fell to five percent by
the end of the First World War. The famine was followed by a serious visi-
tation of the global influenza epidemic in 1918–1919, and typhus killed
many as well. Brigands were common. Although there were British troops in
several parts of the country, many tribal groups had taken up arms, and the
Jangalis were still in control of most of Gilan. Having begun as pro-consti-
tutionalist, the Jangalis came under Russian Bolshevik influence. In the
summer of 1918, with the help of some Bolsheviks, they had forced a British
force under General Lionel Dunsterville to retreat from a confrontation in
Gilan. By this time Dunsterville had learned rather more about the Jangalis
than he had known in January 1918, before he took up his duties in Persia,
when he wrote in his diary,

I get a wire to say that Enzeli, my destination on the Caspian Sea, has been
seized by some horrid fellows called Jangalis (a very suggestive name) who are
intensely anti-British and are in the pay of [the] Germans.27

But the political dislocation (if not the economic distress) was less grave
than it might appear. The devolved rule of local tribal leaders had, after all,
been pretty much the normal state of affairs under the Qajars. Some ac-
counts of the period suggest that there was a disillusionment with constitu-
tionalism and a yearning for strong government. But it is not fully clear that
either was a general mood, nor that the two necessarily went together.28
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Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905–1911, and the Pahlavi Dynasty 215

In the aftermath of the First World War, Britain was juggling a series of
complex and weighty problems over the territory of the Middle East, the
resolution of which would be fateful for the future in several different con-
texts. The size and shape of postwar Turkey had to be resolved, as well as the
nature and borders of the post-Ottoman states in Palestine, Syria, and Iraq.
The British were concerned also to contain, or if possible overturn, the new
communist regime in Russia. All of this came at a time of greatly reduced fi-
nancial means, as a result of the crippling debt incurred during the war, and
with the United States under Woodrow Wilson preaching a new philoso-
phy of international relations—essentially a democratic principle of self-
determination—that appeared to undermine the very foundation of British
imperialism. Iranian nationalists welcomed Wilson’s principles, and again
were encouraged to think of the United States as Iran’s great hope among
the great powers. But like other Middle Eastern states, notably Egypt, repre-
sentatives of the Iranian government were refused access to the peace negoti-
ations at Versailles.

Anglo-Persian Non-Agreement
and Reza Khan
So Britain, having won the war and having achieved supremacy in Persia,
was overstretched—too many calls on too scarce means, and with impor-
tant distractions elsewhere. The British foreign secretary at the time, Lord
Curzon, knew Persia well and had written a thoughtful, magisterial book,
Persia and the Persian Question, on the basis of his travels in 1889–1890. But
although that book was sympathetic to the people of Iran in many respects,
Curzon seems to have overlooked some of its guiding principles, and to
have failed to absorb the significance of the constitutionalist period.29 In
1919 he proposed—or, rather, he attempted to force through—an Anglo-
Persian Agreement that would have reduced Persia to the status of a pro-
tectorate (parallel with the mandate arrangements being set up at the same
time for Iraq and Palestine), with the military and fiscal responsibilities of
government given over to the British. The agreement was rather like earlier
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216 A History of Iran

concession agreements writ large: security guarantees, promises of infra-

structure development for the Persians, and a dollop of cash (a loan of two
million pounds sterling—much of which would have been absorbed by the
salaries of various British officers, officials, and advisers).
The government of the young Ahmad Shah obligingly accepted the
agreement (it was signed in August 1919), but when its details became
known it was thoroughly unpopular, over the whole range of opinion from
democrats to the ulema. Although the agreement might have yielded some
benefits for the development of the country, it was further discredited by the
plentiful bribes with which the British were rumored to be smoothing its
passage. All sectors of opinion condemned the agreement, from socialists
and nationalist former members of the Majles to leading mojtaheds blasting
it by telegram from Karbala. A revolt broke out in Azerbaijan, asserting dem-
ocrat constitutionalist principles and renaming the province Azadistan
(“freedom land”); it was not put down until September. The shah’s govern-
ment sent five leading members of the Majles into internal exile, but gradu-
ally even the government signatories of the agreement began to recognize
the opprobrium heaped on it from all sides, and avoided convening a Majles
to ratify it—without which it could not, under the constitution, be legally
applied. The British tried to apply the provisions of the agreement willy-
nilly, bringing in British officers to command army units, but succeeded only
in hastening the collapse of the government and the resignation of the first
minister in June 1920.30
In London, Lord Curzon still expected to be able to force through the
Anglo-Persian Agreement. But local British commanders on the ground
thought differently—to them and everyone else in Iran, the agreement
looked like a dead duck. The British forces that had been commanded by
Dunsterville—forces which had been resisted successfully by the Jangalis
and their Bolshevik allies—were commanded from October 1920 by Gen-
eral Ironside. Both men embodied certain Edwardian virtues, and both had
literary connections: Dunsterville was the model for Kipling’s Stalky, and it
has been suggested that Ironside inspired John Buchan’s hero Richard
Hannay.
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Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905–1911, and the Pahlavi Dynasty 217

The British troops (now based in Qazvin) were unpopular with the Per-
sians and, after their retreat from Gilan, were somewhat discredited—a
dangerous combination not calculated to overawe nationalist dislike. Iron-
side was an intelligent, tough, decisive career soldier and had been given the
responsibility of helping reequip the Cossack Brigade, now grown to divi-
sion strength, which had also recently withdrawn from the Caspian coast to
a position near Qazvin. He decided almost as he took up his appointment to
exceed his orders. With the reluctant agreement of the shah, he dismissed
the remaining Russian officers of the Cossack corps, judging that although
the Persian troops were good, sound soldiers, the Russian officers were de-
moralized, anti-British, and susceptible to Bolshevik infiltration. When
Curzon found out, he did not approve, but by then it was too late. Ironside
reassured the Persian Cossacks that he had no intention of imposing British
officers on them, and Persian officers were appointed. Acting through his
second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Smyth, Ironside then selected a
former sergeant, Reza Khan, as the most effective soldier, and arranged mat-
ters so that Reza Khan became the de facto commander. Ironside was wor-
ried that, as time went on, the position of the British would deteriorate. The
Bolsheviks might move on Tehran, and if that happened, the Persian Cos-
sacks might side with them. He thought that perhaps it would be better to
let the Cossacks take over while the British were still in a strong position.
The British troops could then make a peaceful withdrawal. Shortly after-
ward, in January 1921, Ironside wrote in his diary,

Personally, I am of opinion that we ought to let these people go before I disap-

pear. . . . In fact, a military dictatorship would solve our troubles and let us out
of the country without any trouble at all.31

The whole question of Britain’s role at this point is controversial, but

there is no direct evidence of a plot as such. The idea that the world of poli-
tics revolves only through the agency of plots and conspiracies is danger-
ously misleading. Ironside knew what he wanted—he wanted British troops
out of Persia (he was personally due to leave in April, but his departure date
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218 A History of Iran

was brought forward to February 18)—and he had a lighter touch. All he

really had to do was let the Cossacks understand that the British would not
intervene if they acted against their government. He felt no pressing need to
consult London or the British minister in Tehran. Ironside had an eye for an
able soldier; events were to show that he also had a canny political sense, and
his choice of Reza Khan showed that, too. Reza Khan also proved to have a
sharper political sense than expected, or than ordinary soldiers are usually
credited with.
On February 16, 1921, Reza Khan marched twenty-five hundred of his
Cossacks from their camp near Qazvin toward Tehran. On February 21, he
was able to take them into the capital without opposition, and the shah al-
lowed him to set up a new government headed by a nationalist journalist,
Seyyed Zia Tabataba’i—not to be confused with the mojtahed Seyyed Mo-
hammad Tabataba’i, who had died in 1918. Reza Khan became Sardar-e
Sepah, commander of the army. A few months later Tabataba’i fell from
power, having alienated both the shah, by reducing the court, and Reza
Khan, by proposing the appointment of British officers to the army. Reza
Khan had managed in the interim to make new friends and broaden his sup-
port. Now he enhanced his position and became Minister for War.
Later in the same year Reza Khan moved against the Jangalis in Gilan
and quickly overcame them, their Soviet allies having departed under the
terms of a new treaty with the Persian government. Their leader, Kuchek
Khan, took refuge in the mountains but died in the snow; when his body
was found his head was brought to Tehran. After this important early suc-
cess, Reza Khan’s priorities turned to regularizing state revenue, strengthen-
ing the armed forces, and enforcing government control over the whole
territory of Persia. This last task meant tough action against tribes like the
Bakhtiari and the Lors, and later the Shahsevan in Azerbaijan and the Turk-
men in the northeast. He also acted against one of the Arab tribes allied
with the British in the southwest, and was again successful. These actions
were popular with most Persians because the tribes had so often facilitated
foreign interventions. Also there was the ancient, uneasy hostility between
tribesmen on the one hand, and the peasants and townspeople on the other.
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Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905–1911, and the Pahlavi Dynasty 219

The fourth Majles convened in 1921, and Reza Khan was able to keep
them broadly supportive of his reform programs by allying with conservative
elements. In 1923 he made himself prime minister, and the shah went on
what was to prove an extended holiday in Europe. At the end of the year, a
fifth Majles convened, later approving a controversial initiative to introduce
conscription, after the ulema had been conciliated with an exemption for re-
ligious students. In 1924, Reza Khan (inspired by the example of Atatürk’s
reforms in Turkey) encouraged a movement to create a republic, and ac-
quired four Rolls-Royce armored cars to help him keep order in Tehran. But
he misjudged the mood of the country and had to stage a resignation for a
time, abandoning the republican project. In 1925, Reza Khan consolidated
his support by visiting Najaf on pilgrimage, temporarily concealing his
Westernizing intentions. He also took the name Pahlavi, which resonated
with nationalists as the name of the Middle Persian language of pre-Islamic
times. The Majles deposed Ahmad Shah and the Qajar dynasty in October,
after Ahmad Shah had let it be known that he intended to return to the
country. Shortly before the end of the year, a constituent assembly agreed to
a changeover from the Qajar to the Pahlavi dynasty, and Reza was crowned
shah early in 1926. Ahmad Shah never did return and died in Paris in 1930.
Reza Khan’s rise to power was facilitated in 1921 by local British com-
manders for their own reasons, but it is incorrect to see his success as a suc-
cess for British foreign policy, or him as a British stooge. On the contrary,
Ironside supported an action by Reza Khan precisely because he perceived
current British policy to have failed. Reza Khan took advantage of Ironside’s
willingness to give him his chance, but made no commitment to future pro-
British alignment, and there is no indication that Ironside expected or asked
for any such guarantees. The coup of 1921 and its aftermath came about as a
result of a temporary coincidence of interests.
As for the people of Iran, it is not entirely correct to see Reza Khan’s suc-
cess as the outcome of the desire of the people for a strong man on a white
horse to overcome political chaos, after a failed democratic experiment. The
period 1921–1926 has been compared with the period of regency leading up
to Nader Shah’s coronation in 1736, in which he too prepared the way with
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220 A History of Iran

military successes; but the comparison, though attractive, is not entirely ap-
posite. The Constitutional Revolution had aimed, among other things, at
modernization, centralization, strong government, and an end to foreign
meddling in the country. Reza Khan became shah in 1925–1926 with the
connivance of the Majles, because they judged he would fulfill those pur-
poses, where earlier attempts by others had failed. He largely justified their
confidence in him. But his reforming success was achieved at the expense of
liberal, representative government. He was to an extent the nemesis of the
Constitutional Revolution, but he was also the child of it.32
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7
The Pahlavis and the
Revolution of 1979

Is it not passing brave to be a king

And ride in triumph through Persepolis?
—Christopher Marlowe

Reza Khan was about forty-two when he became Sardar-e Sepah after the
coup in 1921. Although there was much supposition and mythmaking after
he became shah, little is known for sure of his origins beyond that he was
born in the village of Alasht in the thickly wooded Savad Kuh region of
Mazanderan. Some have suggested that his family had Turkic origins, oth-
ers Pashtun. It seems his father died when he was still an infant, and his
mother brought him to Tehran, where he grew up in her brother’s house-
hold. Through the uncle’s connections with the Cossack Brigade, the young
Reza was able to enlist with them when he was fifteen. He grew up to be
tall and tough, with a grim expression and a heavy jaw. Some of the better-
educated technocrats that he appointed to fulfill his modernization pro-
gram found his manner and speech embarrassingly crude, and some sneered
at his lack of culture. But none would have done so to his face, and most
found his presence daunting.1

221
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222 A History of Iran

Man of Action
Reza Khan’s attitudes and motivations emerge above all from his actions.
He came to power not just to be shah or to preside, as the Qajars had
done—he disdained their ineffectual style of rule. The Pahlavi monarchy
was an odd kind of monarchy, with no real roots in tradition. It was estab-
lished only after Reza Khan had failed to set up a republic. To him, being
shah was a means to an end, not an end in itself. And his underlying pur-
pose was to control the country, to make the country strong, to develop it so
that it could be truly independent, to modernize it so that it could deal with
the great powers on an equal basis, to have a strong army to resist foreign in-
terventions, and to impose order internally so that, as in other modern
countries, the state enjoyed sole control. These aims, and the autocratic
methods used to realize them, reflected his military background and the
Russian influence he had lived with in the Cossack Brigade. Initially he had
to compromise with the Majles, but time would show that he was no friend
to free political expression. In addition, he had a model, Kemal Atatürk, who
after a successful military career had established himself as the supreme au-
thority in Turkey on secular, nationalist principles, backed by a strong army.
With great determination, Atatürk had set about a plan for state-directed
industrialization and economic development. Much has been made of Reza
Shah’s connections with fascism, but this was the age of dictators, whether
fascist, communist, or otherwise. Reza Shah had little need to look further
afield than Turkey—not in the 1920s, at least.
In 1926 Iran was still a country of peasant villages, tribes, and small towns
(in that order), with little industry and an overall population of only twelve
million people, the overwhelming majority of whom were illiterate. Patterns
of trade and the economic life in the bazaars had adapted to the wider world
economy; in Tehran and other major cities, there were some of the superficial
trappings of modernity—streetlights, motor vehicles, and paving. But in the
great expanses beyond, little had changed since the time of Nader Shah.
Among the transformations imposed by Reza Shah, the first and most
central was the expansion of the army. The army was the shah’s highest prior-
ity and greatest interest, and most of the other developments he imposed can
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The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979 223

be explained in terms of the support they gave to the goal of making the army
strong, efficient, and modern. The plan for an army of five divisions, with ten
thousand men per division, was announced in January 1922, but problems
with conscription, finance, and equipment persisted, and the force was still
twenty percent understrength in 1926. Despite approval of the conscription
law in June 1925, there was great opposition to its implementation, especially
among tribal groups. The measure was not properly applied until 1930, and
not imposed properly on the tribes until the mid-1930s or later. But by the
late 1930s the army stood at more than one hundred thousand men, with re-
serves theoretically taking potential strength up to four hundred thousand.2
Despite these figures, the efficiency of the forces (outside Tehran, where
the standard of the central division was rather higher) was not impressive.
For local actions against the tribes, provincial commanders still recruited
tribal contingents on an ad hoc basis, as had been done for centuries. Morale
of the ordinary conscripts was low. They were not well paid—most of the
large sums spent on the army went to buy equipment, including tanks (from
the Skoda works in Czechoslovakia), artillery (from Sweden), and aircraft
(an air force of 154 airplanes by 1936), as well as rifles and other material.
Forty percent of government expenditure went to the army, even in the
1920s. Later it received almost all of the growing income from oil, though
the overall proportion of state revenue spent on defense fell as the size of the
total budget rose.3 From 1922 to 1927, state finances were organized by an-
other American, Arthur Millspaugh (after negotiations in which the Irani-
ans had tried to get Schuster to return). But although their relationship was
initially good, and the American had public approval to a degree no Briton
or other foreigner could have expected, the shah eventually grew resentful at
the restrictions Millspaugh placed on his military spending. They argued,
and Reza Pahlavi declared: “There can’t be two shahs in this country.”4
Millspaugh’s position became impossible, and he resigned in 1927.
A second major effort by the new regime was in the improvement of
transport infrastructure. In 1927 there were an estimated thirty-one hun-
dred miles of roads fit for motor transport, nearly a third of which had been
built by foreign troops during the First World War; by 1938 there were
some fifteen thousand miles of roads. Whereas in 1925 Iran had only about
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224 A History of Iran

one hundred fifty miles of railways, by 1938 there were a little more than one
thousand. But by that time, the less expensive highway transport was tend-
ing to supplant rail.
Reza Shah invested in industry a similar amount to that invested in rail-
ways. This was especially true of industries aimed at substituting domestic
production for imports—textiles, tobacco, sugar, and other food and drink
products. Over half of the investment came from private capital.5 It was not
a huge transformation by comparison with what was being achieved in
Turkey—let alone Stalin’s Russia. But it was impressive, nonetheless, espe-
cially given the low base point from which Reza Shah had started, and the
failures of the past.
More impressive, and in the long run probably more important, was the
expansion of education. Total school attendance went from 55,131 in 1922
to 457,236 in 1938. In 1924 there were 3,300 pupils in secondary schools; by
1940 the number had risen to 28,200. The school system was far from uni-
versal, and it neglected almost all the rural population (though there was a
small but successful initiative for schools in tribal areas). The system has
been criticized for being overly narrow and mechanical, teaching through
rote learning and lacking in intellectual stimulation. But this reflected its
main purpose: to educate efficient and unimaginative army officers and bu-
reaucrats. Reza Shah did not want to educate a new generation of free
thinkers who would oppose his rule and encourage others to do so. But as
elsewhere, education proved a slippery thing, and many educated in this way
nonetheless went on to dispute Reza Shah’s supremacy in just the way he
had sought to avoid. Through the 1930s, a small but significant elite were
sent on government-funded scholarships to study at universities abroad (es-
pecially in France), and in 1935 the foundation was laid for a university in
Tehran. In 1940 there were 411 graduates, and in 1941 the university
awarded its first doctorates.6
From the point at which he became shah, Reza inexorably strengthened
his own position and the autocratic nature of his regime. Although he came
to power with the agreement of the Majles, opponents like Mohammad
Mossadeq (a future prime minister) and Seyyed Hasan Modarres (the lead-
ing representative of the ulema in the Majles) had predicted that he would
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The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979 225

erode the liberal elements of the constitution. Mossadeq held firm to his po-
sition and was later imprisoned. But after Reza Shah’s coronation, Modarres
and others attempted to make a compromise with him that would leave some
space for the Majles, and for constitutional government. Constitutionalists
took office as ministers, including, later, Hasan Taqizadeh, who had been
prominent in 1906–1911. But few of them had happy careers in office. A se-
ries of ministers were sacked, imprisoned, or banished, sometimes for no
clear reason other than the shah’s suspicions—or his need to assert his per-
sonal authority. Modarres himself did not accept office, but his compromise
failed, he was arrested in 1928, sent in custody to Khorasan, and was mur-
dered there at prayer in 1938. Loyal ministers such as Teymurtash, Firuz, and
Davar were arrested and murdered in prison or induced to commit suicide.
Taqizadeh was fortunate to be sent overseas in semi-banishment instead.
Writers and poets also suffered, as censorship was tightened and freedom
of expression curtailed, strangling the burst of literary output that had
emerged in the early decades of the century.
Sadeq Hedayat was one of the most distinguished writers of the twenti-
eth century in Iran. Born in 1903 in Tehran, he studied in France in the
1920s. As a young man, he became an enthusiast for a romantic Iranian na-
tionalism that laid much of the blame for Iran’s problems on the Arab con-
quest of the seventh century. His short stories and novellas—Talab-e
Amorzesh (Seeking Absolution), Sag-e Velgard (Stray Dog), and his best-known,
Buf-e Kur (The Blind Owl)—combined the every day, the fantastic, and the
satirical. Hedayat’s work rejected religion, superstition, and Arabic influence
in Iranian life (sometimes in unpleasantly vivid terms) but in an innovative,
modernist style that through its relentlessly honest observation of everyday
life reaches the highest standards of world literature. He translated Kafka,
Chekhov, and Sartre into Persian and was also an enthusiast for the poetry
of Omar Khayyam. Hedayat committed suicide in Paris in 1951; his works
were banned in their entirety by the Ahmadinejad government in 2006.7
Another literary figure to die in 1951 was Mohammad Taqi Bahar, him-
self a poet but also the great critic of Persian poetry. Putting forward a theo-
retical structure for the literary history of Persia, Bahar identified in
particular a revival (bazgasht) in the latter part of the eighteenth century, in
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226 A History of Iran

which poets deliberately rejected the Safavid style in favor of a return to the
style of the tenth and eleventh centuries. In Bahar’s own lifetime another new
wave of poetic style came in, linked like the innovative prose of Hedayat to
the change in attitudes in the period of the Constitutional Revolution. The
first great exemplar of this change was Nima Yushij, who lived from 1895 to
1959. Nima wrote in a new way, breaking many of the rules of classical Per-
sian poetic form. He used new vocabulary and new images drawn from direct
observation of nature. For many years his freer style of poetry was resisted by
the more tradition minded. But later it found acceptance, becoming the
model for younger poets—notably Forugh Farrokhzad (1935–1967).8
Reza Shah visited Atatürk in Turkey in 1934, and the visit symbolized the
parallels between the two regimes. The nationalist, modernizing, secularizing,
Westernizing features shared by both were obvious. Reza Shah’s education
policy supported the founding of girls’ schools, and he banned the veil. He
wanted Iran and the Iranians to look Western and modern—men, too, had to
wear Western dress, and at one point he decreed that all should wear Western
headgear, with the result that the streets were suddenly awash with fedoras
and bowler hats.9 As in Turkey, the shah set up a language reform to remove
words not of Persian origin, and to replace them with Persian words. Then, in
order to differentiate his regime from the decadent style and national humilia-
tions of the Qajar period, in 1935 he ordered that foreign governments should
drop the name “Persia” in official communications and use instead the name
“Iran”—the ancient name that had always been used by Iranians themselves.
In 1927/1928 he ended the capitulations, according to which, since the treaty
of Turkmanchai, foreigners had enjoyed extraterritorial privilege in Iran, being
free from the jurisdiction of the Iranian authorities.
But Reza Shah did not pursue the Westernizing agenda as far as Atatürk.
For example, despite the language reform, there was no change of alphabet
to the Roman script, as was done in Turkey. And although he achieved the
removal of some of the worst abuses of foreign interference in Iran, he even-
tually had to accept the continuation of British exploitation of oil in the
south—a deal that brought a poor return (sixteen percent of profits) in pro-
portion to the real value of such an important national resource. In 1928, the
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The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979 227

court minister Teymurtash—the shah’s closest adviser at the time—wrote

to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, announcing that the terms of the origi-
nal D’Arcy oil concession had to be renegotiated. The negotiations swung
back and forth over the next few years, and in 1932 the shah intervened, uni-
laterally canceling the concession. The British sent additional ships to the
Persian Gulf, and took the case to the International Court of Justice in The
Hague. Shortly afterward the shah, frustrated by the failure of the negotia-
tions, sacked Teymurtash, imprisoned him, and in October 1933 had him
murdered there. Eventually a deal with Britain was patched up, only mod-
estly increasing the Iranian government’s share of the profits to twenty per-
cent. The duration of the concession was extended to 1993.10
Atatürk’s Turkey was not subject to any such foreign exploitation. And
whereas Atatürk retained his personal popularity to the end, by the end of
the 1930s Reza Shah had alienated almost all of the support he had been
given when he took power. The ulema had seen much of what they had
most feared in the Constitutional Revolution—especially in education and
the law—enacted without their being able to prevent it. By the end of the
1930s, their prestigious and lucrative role as judges and notaries had been
reformed away. They hated the rulings on Western dress and the veil, and a
protest against these developments in 1935 had led to a massacre in the
shrine precincts of the Emam Reza at Mashhad: several hundred people
were machine-gunned by the shah’s troops, further deepening the regime’s
unpopularity.11 The bazaar merchants disliked the state monopolies on vari-
ous items that the shah had brought in to boost state revenue. Liberals and
intellectuals were alienated by the repression, censorship, and the closure of
newspapers, let alone the murders in prison of popular politicians. There
was even dissent within the army. So when a new war brought a new crisis,
Reza Shah had few friends left.12

New Masks, Same Old Ugly Sisters

It is usually said that the British and the Russians took over in Iran in 1941
because Reza Shah had shown himself to be pro-German and pro-Nazi,
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228 A History of Iran

and the Allies feared that if they did not move in, then the Germans would.
But the situation was more complex than that. At the time of the Anglo-
Soviet intervention of 1941, no German armed forces were threatening Iran
directly. The German push to take Baku and the Caucasus oil fields only
came later, in the summer of 1942. The shah himself, despite having encour-
aged the Germans earlier to a certain extent, had been resisting German in-
fluence within the country.
But when Britain and the Soviet Union were thrown into alliance in 1941
by Hitler’s invasion of Russia (in June), Britain’s position in the Middle East
was looking uncertain. The crucial interests for Britain were the Suez Canal
and the Iranian oil fields. Having defeated an Italian effort to break into
Egypt from Libya in 1940, British forces in North Africa were put on the
defensive by the arrival of Rommel and the German Afrika Korps. In the
spring of 1941 they had to retreat back toward Alexandria, leaving a garrison
to be surrounded in Tobruk. At about the same time, in April, there was an
anti-British revolt in Iraq, encouraged by the Germans and assisted by Luft-
waffe aircraft. This necessitated an intervention by British troops, who com-
pleted their occupation of the country by the end of May. In June, rattled by
these developments, Britain sent British and Free French troops into
Lebanon and Syria to unseat the Nazi-aligned Vichy French governments
there.
Seen in that context, the British and Soviet takeover of Iran in August
1941 looks more like part of a rounding-out of strategic policy in the region,
at a particularly dangerous and uncertain moment for the Allies—part of
the inexorable totalizing logic of the war itself. But Iran did have major sig-
nificance in another aspect. Hitler’s successes—from Norway to Denmark
to Poland to France to Yugoslavia to Greece, in 1940 and the early part of
1941—meant that the avenues for Britain and the Soviet Union to support
each other were restricted to the hazardous Arctic route to Murmansk in
the north, or some southern alternative. And once Hitler’s Barbarossa offen-
sive had swept all before it in Byelorussia and the Ukraine, the Soviets ur-
gently needed supplies from the West to help equip the new armies to
replace the Soviet troops that had been herded off into German camps or
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The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979 229

slave-labor factories as prisoners of war. The route from the Persian Gulf to
the Caspian, arduous and long though it was, appeared to be an answer. By
the end of the war, more than five million tons had been taken to Russia
through Iran, by both road and rail—though this was a relatively small part
of the overall effort.
Reza Shah had flirted with the Nazi regime in the 1930s, and German
diplomats had encouraged what they saw as the shah’s Aryanization of the
language. Through the 1930s more German technicians and engineers ar-
rived in Iran—the shah favored them as an alternative to the British, who
were disliked and suspected by many Iranians. But the shah was as hostile to
possible German meddling in Iran as he was to foreign meddling of any
other kind. He also had a strong dislike for any nascent political move-
ments—fascist or communist—that might oppose his government. A small
group of apparently pro-fascist students were arrested in 1937, and their
leader was later murdered in prison. In 1940 the police shot a prominent
Zoroastrian in the street because his son had made pro-Nazi broadcasts in
Germany. A group of Marxists were also arrested in 1937; most of them were
given harsh prison sentences, and later went on to form the pro-Communist
Tudeh party.13 These developments reflected the bitter polarization of poli-
tics between fascism and communism in Europe at the time. Some of these
radicals were from that small elite who had been educated at European uni-
versities at the government’s expense. An upsurge of ugly anti-Semitic jour-
nalism contributed to a period of increased anxiety for Iranian Jews in the
1930s—and may have contributed to an increase in Jewish emigration to
Palestine—but the notion of a rising tide of pro-Nazi and pro-German feel-
ing among people and government before August 1941 has sometimes been
overstated. The historian Ervand Abrahamian has suggested that the Allied
intervention may have been not so much to remove a pro-Nazi shah as to
forestall a pro-German coup against the shah, as had happened in Iraq.14
The Allied demand that Iran should expel German nationals was
nonetheless the immediate casus belli. After the demand was refused, the Al-
lied invasion of Iran in August 1941 met only token opposition from the
army on which Reza Shah had spent so much attention and money (this is
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230 A History of Iran

where a comparison with Nader Shah finally breaks down), and after three
days he ordered his troops to cease further resistance. British and Soviet
forces met in central Iran and entered Tehran on September 17, 1941.
The shah abdicated in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza, and the Allies
maintained their control over the country until after the end of the war in
1945. It seems that Reza Shah’s relationship with his son had been some-
thing like that between a senior officer and a subordinate. Mohammad Reza
Pahlavi was educated in Switzerland in the 1930s, which did not bring him
any closer to his parents or to the people he was going to rule. Mohammad
Reza had a sharp mind but was socially shy and diffident—a legacy from his
education and his relationship with his harsh father.
The Allies were the immediate cause of Reza Shah’s abdication, but his
removal was welcomed by most Iranians, and some have suggested that his
unpopularity would have made it impossible for the Allies to rule with him
still on the throne—even if he had accepted that arrangement.15 Reza went
into exile in South Africa (where he died in July 1944).
In December 1941 the United States joined the Allies against Germany
and Japan, and in 1942 American troops joined the British and Russian
forces occupying Iran. At the end of 1943 Tehran hosted the first great con-
ference of the leaders of the three Allied powers. Among the arrangements
that Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt agreed upon for the conduct of the
war—including opening a second front in western Europe in 1944—was
the commitment to withdraw from Iran within six months of the war’s end.
Ripples from the terrible events of the Holocaust also reached the coun-
try. In 1942 a group of orphaned children—refugees from the Jewish ghet-
toes and shtetls of Poland who had escaped into Russia only to be interned in
Siberia and then sent by train southward—arrived in Iran on the Caspian
coast, after many bitter hardships. They were brought to Tehran, where they
were given help by the Iranian Jewish community and by Zionist organiza-
tions. Having recovered from the poor condition in which they arrived, 848
children eventually made their way to Palestine.16
At the same time, a descendant of the Qajar royal family—Abdol-Hosein
Sardari Qajar, who has been called the Iranian Schindler—was looking after
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The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979 231

the Iranian Embassy building in Paris after the embassy’s main functions
had moved to Vichy. Sardari was left a supply of blank passports, and when
Jews in Paris began to be rounded up by the Nazis in 1942, he began issuing
them to Iranian Jews, many of whom had lived in Paris for some years. He
also secured an assurance from the German authorities in Paris that Iranian
citizens would not be detained or harmed. But as the measures against Jews
in Paris intensified, French Jews with no Iranian connections began to come
to him too, desperate for help. Becoming aware of the enormity of the crime
being perpetrated by the Nazis, Sardari gave his passports —more than five
hundred of them—to those Jews as well. After the war, Sardari’s govern-
ment charged him with misconduct over these passports, but he was given a
personal pardon by Mohammad Reza Shah. When asked later about what
he had done for the Jews in Paris, Sardari apparently said it had been his
duty to help Iranian citizens. When asked about the Jews who had not been
Iranians, he said, “That was my duty as a human being.”17 Sardari died in
1981 and, in 2004, was posthumously given an award by the Simon Wiesen-
thal Center.
While the war continued, Allied troops maintained their control in Iran,
and the powers of the Pahlavi government were severely limited. But Moham-
mad Reza Shah had confirmed at his coronation that he would rule as a con-
stitutional monarch, and in 1944 elections were held for the first genuinely
representative Majles since the 1920s. Many familiar figures from the consti-
tutionalist period reappeared—notably Seyyed Zia Tabataba’i and Moham-
mad Mossadeq, as well as some of the same nationalist landowners and
officials who had been active in politics before Reza Khan became shah.
They had just grown older.
The humiliation of the invasion, the presence of the Allies, the food short-
ages, the economic disruption caused by the war, the weakness of the govern-
ment—all of it helped to stimulate another upsurge in political activity,
especially nationalistic feeling. One focus of this was again the unequal distri-
bution of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s (AIOC) profits (the company
had changed its name from Anglo-Persian in recognition of the Shah’s re-
quest that the country be known as Iran). The Iranian-based industry was
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232 A History of Iran

the biggest and best developed in the Middle East at the time. But through
taxation of the AIOC in the United Kingdom, the British government gar-
nered more profit from the Iranian oil industry than the Iranian government
did (nearly double over the period 1932–195018). The Allied occupation was
unpopular, but the British and Russians were more unpopular than the
Americans. A sign of this was that another figure from the past, Arthur
Millspaugh, returned in November 1942 to his old job of running Iranian
state finances. Although Millspaugh set to work with his usual diligence, he
showed a lack of sensitivity to the political and social conditions of Iran at the
time. His attempts to end food subsidies and to privatize state institutions
eventually made him unpopular, and led to his resignation two years later.
The shah tried to appeal to pro-American feeling, and to the United
States for support. He made a speech drawing a comparison between Ira-
nian nationalism and Iran’s struggle for independence, and American na-
tionalism and America’s struggle for independence—from the British
Empire, of course. In the heightened intensity of political debate under the
Allied occupation, the young shah felt the need to appeal to popular opin-
ion. As during the constitutionalist period, new newspapers—and this time,
new political parties—proliferated. By 1943, there were forty-seven news-
papers in Tehran (there would be seven hundred by 1951).19 Of the new par-
ties, the most significant was the founding in 1941 of the pro-Communist
Tudeh, which reoriented the intelligentsia in a pro-Tudeh, Marxist-leaning
direction.20 Radio ownership was also expanding rapidly, exercising a further
integrating influence and focusing the attention even of isolated villagers on
national events and discussions.
As the war came to an end, doubts began to arise over whether or not the
Soviet troops would depart from Azerbaijan. Making use of the social dem-
ocratic tradition in the region and the strong position of the Tudeh party
there, the Russians pursued an imperialistic policy that prefigured and
helped bring on the confrontation of the Cold War. They encouraged pro-
Soviet secessionist movements in Azerbaijan—Kurdish as well as Azeri
(there was more serious enthusiasm for secession among the Kurds than
among the Azeris), with the aim of re-creating there something like the old
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The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979 233

Russian sphere of influence of 1907–1914. By the beginning of January

1946 British and American troops had left Iran, but the Soviets were still
there in Azerbaijan, posing as protectors for Tudeh and the secessionists
(there had been some attacks on Tudeh offices elsewhere in the country) and
confronting the Iranian army on the margins of the province. Nationalist
feeling in Tehran about the situation in the northwest was intense. Re-
spected intellectuals like Ahmad Kasravi wrote of the danger that the coun-
try could split up entirely.
Kasravi, born in Tabriz in 1890, was initially trained in a seminary and
was involved in the dramatic events of the Constitutional Revolution in
Azerbaijan. But he rejected his religious training when he learned that the
comet he saw in 1910 had been predicted by European astronomers as the
return of Halley’s comet, last seen in 1835: “I was pleased and happy that in
Europe, knowledge had fallen into such a lucid path.” Kasravi turned from a
clerical postulant into a wickedly intelligent critic of the ulema—but also a
critic of many other aspects of contemporary Iranian society. His pamphlet
What Is the Religion of the Hajjis with Warehouses? attacked the pious postur-
ing of merchants who shamelessly pursued the sharpest of practices in their
commercial dealings. Another, entitled Hasan Is Burning His Book of Hafez,
attacked the disposition, as he saw it, of many Iranians to substitute quota-
tions from the great poets for genuine thought. Devoted to the principles of
constitutionalism and secular government, Kasravi was a nationalist who at-
tacked the linguistic and other divisions that divided Iranians and, in his
opinion, had made them weak. He worked for many years in the Ministry of
Education and as a journalist and writer. In 1946 he was assassinated by a
group of Islamic extremists, followers of a man who had chosen to call him-
self Navvab Safavi.21
Kasravi is significant for a number of reasons. He stands for a certain
strand of thinking in Iran, typical of the Pahlavi period in some ways, that
became important again in the 1960s and 1970s, which rejected the back-
wardness of Shi‘ism and blamed it for many of the weaknesses and failures
of the country. His thinking was influential among the middle classes who
benefited from the opportunities that arose under the Pahlavis.
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234 A History of Iran

His disapproval of the cult of Persian poetry is interesting because it

again shows the cultural centrality of the great Persian poets—and points to
the ambiguity in Iranian culture that they expressed and perhaps sustained.
Roy Mottahedeh wrote:

In fact, Persian poetry came to be the emotional home in which the ambiguity
that was at the heart of Iranian culture lived most freely and openly. What
Persian poetry expressed was not an enigma to be solved but an enigma that
was unsolvable. In Persian poetry of any worth nothing was merely something
else; the inner space of the spirit in which Persian poetry underwent its thou-
sand transformations was ultimately a place where this ambiguous language
reached a private emotional value that had to remain private, because to de-
code it as mere allegory, to reexpress it in any form of explanatory paraphrase
would be to place it back in the public domain and, therefore, in the realm in
which it was intended to remain ambiguous.22

Eventually, after a tense period of negotiations and pressure from the

United States and Britain, the Soviets announced their intention to with-
draw from Iran. By the end of May 1946, their forces were gone. Iranian
troops then marched in and reimposed central government control—with
some brutality. The episode discredited the Soviet Union for many Iranians,
but not so the members of Tudeh. The party grew in influence, took places
in the government cabinet and helped to bring forward new labor laws, set
maximum working hours, and established a minimum wage. But in 1949
Tudeh members were accused of instigating an assassination attempt
against the young shah. After that the party was banned, and could only
make its influence felt through underground activity or through sympathetic
writers and journalists. The United States, profiting from the Russians’ un-
popularity, increased its presence by bringing in advisers and technicians and
by supplying training assistance to the army, as well as other aid. Nationalist
feeling was gratified by the restoration of Iranian territorial integrity in Azer-
baijan, and attention turned back to other grievances—especially to the ques-
tion of oil.
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The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979 235

Mossadeq
The assassination attempt of 1949 against the Shah precipitated an ex-
tended period of crisis, demonstrations, and martial law. In 1950 the shah
appointed a new prime minister, Ali Razmara, but Razmara was not popu-
lar; he was suspected of pro-British sympathies, and his military back-
ground encouraged concern that the shah intended a return to the
militaristic, autocratic style of government his father had favored in the
1930s. Over the same period, Mohammad Mossadeq assembled a broad
coalition of Majles deputies that came to be called the National Front. It was
organized around a central demand for oil nationalization, and Mossadeq
was also widely believed to have reached an accommodation with Tudeh.
The shah’s government attempted to negotiate with the AIOC for a revision
of the terms of the oil concession, but the AIOC were slow to accept the
fifty-fifty split of profits that had become the norm in oil agreements else-
where in the world. The National Front and its demand for oil nationaliza-
tion were greatly strengthened in Majles elections in 1950, and in March
1951 Razmara was assassinated by the same extremist Islamic group that
had murdered Kasravi. It was inevitable that Mossadeq, as the most popular
politician in the country, would become prime minister.
Mossadeq was nearly seventy in 1951. He had Qajar ancestry and had
studied in Paris and Switzerland, taking a doctorate in law. Having left the
country in protest at the Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919, he had opposed
Reza Shah’s accession to power and had been imprisoned for it, before re-
turning to prominence in the 1940s. His whole life had been dedicated to
the cause of Iranian national integrity and constitutional government. Un-
der his leadership, the Majles voted on March 15, 1951, to nationalize Ira-
nian oil. On April 28 they named Mossadeq prime minister.
But nationalization created an impasse, as British technicians left the oil
installations in Khuzestan and the British government imposed a blockade.
No oil could be exported. Instead of contributing to the national revenue, the
maintenance of oil installations and the salaries of oil workers became a drain
on finances, gradually creating a large debt and wider economic problems.
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236 A History of Iran

Mossadeq traveled to the United States in hopes of getting a loan, but he

was refused. U.S. oil companies joined a boycott of Iranian oil, and the U.S.
government was increasingly concerned at the apparent involvement of com-
munists in the oil nationalization movement (Tudeh had led strikes and
demonstrations). In hindsight, the U.S. position seems strange, given the
plain fact that nationalization enjoyed broad support across most classes
and shades of opinion. But the movement was vocally anti-British, and some
voices anti-Western. In the atmosphere of the times, especially after the ad-
vent of the Eisenhower administration and of Senator Joe McCarthy, the in-
volvement of an underground communist movement with Soviet support
was enough to damn the whole phenomenon in U.S. eyes.
Despite deepening economic difficulties and the disappointing realiza-
tion that he could expect no help from the United States in his confronta-
tion with the British, Mossadeq continued as prime minister, enjoying
massive support both in Majles and in the country itself. But tensions be-
tween different elements of the National Front coalition increased, as did
the apparent strength of Tudeh, and there were more demonstrations. The
government brought in new reforms, including measures that changed the
relationship between landlords and peasants in favor of the latter, and
Mossadeq used his support to pursue an older agenda of limiting the power
of the monarchy. But in the summer of 1952 when Mossadeq demanded the
right to appoint the minister of war to deal with the increasing unrest, the
shah refused, and Mossadeq resigned. His successor immediately an-
nounced negotiations with the British to resolve the oil dispute, and the
country erupted in demonstrations of disapproval in which Tudeh took a
prominent role. The shah quickly caved in and reappointed Mossadeq, who
broke diplomatic relations with Britain altogether at the end of the year. By
this time the British were encouraging the United States to cooperate in en-
gineering a coup to get rid of Mossadeq.
Finally, in August 1953, the plan went ahead: Mossadeq was to be re-
moved as prime minister and replaced with General Zahedi, a fervent
monarchist. But the plot misfired. Mossadeq found out about the coup,
probably through Tudeh, and was able to forestall it. The shah fled the coun-
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The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979 237

try and anti-royalist rioting broke out. Mossadeq sent in police and troops
to control the riots, and they succeeded, but they also alienated many of
Mossadeq’s own supporters, as well as Tudeh. So when a new demonstra-
tion appeared two days later on August 19, this time against Mossadeq, his
supporters stayed away. This demonstration included supporters of Ayatol-
lah Abol-Ghasem Kashani—previously loyal to the National Front, but
now on the other side—from the bazaar, and people paid to participate by
the CIA, which had given the coup the code name Operation Ajax. Many
members of the murky south Tehran underworld took part, including gang
leaders like Sha’ban Ja‘fari Bimokh (Sha’ban the Brainless).23 In the wake of
this demonstration Mossadeq was arrested, the army and Zahedi were in
control, and the shah returned. Mossadeq was tried and convicted of treason
by a military court but was allowed to live under house arrest until he died
in 1967.
The coup could perhaps not have happened without mistakes of
Mossadeq’s own making—and in fact it nearly failed. But it certainly would
not have happened without the intervention of the British SIS and the
American CIA.24 Although the story of the coup did not emerge for many
years and perhaps has not done so fully even now, Iranians blamed these two
agencies at the time and have done so bitterly ever since. The idea that every-
thing that happened in Iranian politics was manipulated by a hidden foreign
hand was again reinforced, fathering dozens of improbable conspiracy
theories in later years. Mossadeq became a national hero across most ideo-
logical, class, and religious boundaries.
The coup also had significance in a number of other ways. It established
the United States in Iran as the prime ally and protector of the Pahlavi
regime, and it achieved the aim of eclipsing Soviet communist influence. But
it also took away much of the enchantment the United States had previ-
ously enjoyed popularly as a virtuous alternative to the older powers. The
significance of the event took some time to sink in. For a while some Irani-
ans still believed, or hoped, that the Americans had been duped by the
British, and that fundamental U.S. values would reassert themselves. But
the United States was Prince Charming no more. One could draw a parallel
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238 A History of Iran

with British decisions in the 1870s and at other times, which appeared to
serve immediate short-term British interests but treated Iran as an instru-
ment to other ends rather than with the respect due a partner. In the long
run, as with British actions in the previous century, the removal of
Mossadeq damaged U.S. interests in a much more serious way than could
have been imagined at the time.
The events of 1951–1953 also alienated many Iranians from the young
shah, making popular support for him in subsequent decades equivocal at
best. Beyond Iran, the significance of the struggle to nationalize Iranian oil
was widely felt in the Middle East. It is generally accepted, for example, that
the episode played an important part in the thinking of Egypt’s Jamal Abd
al-Nasser (Nasser), who in July 1956 followed the example of Mossadeq and
nationalized the Suez Canal. It would not be the last time that Iran, for bet-
ter or worse, would indicate in advance the way events would unfold in the
region more widely.
But the Mossadeq era disillusioned many young Iranians about politics
and the chances for change. One such was Jalal Al-e Ahmad, a complex man
who was against many things, and only ambiguously in favor of a few. He
had been born into an ulema family in Tehran in 1923, but turned against a
religious career (having read Kasravi) and later became a Marxist under the
influence of Khalil Maleki, one of the group arrested by Reza Shah in 1937.
But in the long run Ahmad was too critical and too individualistic to be a
conventional Marxist. Like Maleki, he disliked the way Tudeh had to toe the
Soviet line after World War II. He actively supported Mossadeq, but after
his fall renounced politics dramatically and publicly. Like Kasravi, he had an
aversion to the traditions of classical Persian literature, favoring a lean style
of writing that echoed the colloquial Persian of ordinary people. The most
influential of his ideas was that of gharbzadegi—often translated as “Westox-
ication” or “West-strickenness”—which he put forward in talks and a book
with that title in 1962. This attacked the uncritical way in which Western
ideas had been accepted, advocated, and taught in schools. The result, said
Al-e Ahmad, was the creation of a people and a culture that were neither
genuinely Iranian nor properly Western. Following a story by Mawlana
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The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979 239

Rumi, he compared it to a crow that one day saw the elegant way a partridge
walked. The crow tried to imitate the partridge and failed, but kept trying,
with the result that he forgot how to walk like a crow—but never succeeded
in walking like a partridge.
As time went on, Al-e Ahmad was increasingly drawn back to religion
(having initially followed the scornful, satirical example of Hedayat), but he
always disliked the superstition and empty traditionalism of many of the
ulema—“satisfied to be the gatekeeper at the graveyard.” Later, he drew at-
tention to the way oil wealth was spent on imported absurdities that earlier
generations of Iranians could never have imagined they could want, and to
the artificial, invented historical heritage presented by Mohammad Reza
Shah as the backdrop to the Pahlavi monarchy. Al-e Ahmad brought some
of the jaded anomie of Western modernism to Iranian literature, while keep-
ing a strongly Iranian voice. He translated Sartre and Camus into Persian,
but his firm attachment to intellectual honesty and his search for an authen-
tic way to live did not borrow from anyone. He died young in 1969, and his
status as a modernist hero was only slightly weakened by his wife Simin
Daneshvar’s later revelations of his grumpy selfishness in their married life.
He was a strong influence on a whole generation of Iranian intellectuals who
were his contemporaries, and on those who came after him.25

The Rule of Mohammad Reza Shah

and the White Revolution
The Mossadeq coup ended the period of pluralism that had begun with the
fall of Reza Shah in 1941, and inaugurated an extended period in which
Mohammad Reza Shah ruled personally with few constitutional limita-
tions. The oil dispute was resolved with an arrangement that gave the Ira-
nian government fifty percent of the profits, out of a consortium in which
the U.S. companies had a forty percent stake, now equal to that held by the
AIOC (renamed British Petroleum in 1954—BP). The increased oil rev-
enue, which grew as the industry developed, permitted a big expansion of
government expenditure. Much of this, as in the time of Reza Shah, was
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240 A History of Iran

spent on military equipment—augmented by $500 million of U.S. military

aid between 1953 and 1963. Many in government circles felt that too much
money was being spent on the military budget, and in 1959 that dispute
contributed to the resignation of Abol-Hassan Ebtehaj, head of the Plan-
ning and Budget Organization.26 In return the shah aligned himself un-
equivocally with the West, and diplomatic relations with Britain were
restored in 1954. But from 1953 onward it was plain to all that the United
States was now the dominant external power in Iran.
After the coup, the shah’s government kept a tight grip on politics. Can-
didates for the elections to the eighteenth Majles in 1954 were selected by
the regime, and the assembly proved duly obedient. In 1955 the shah dis-
missed Zahedi and effectively took control into his own hands. Mossadeq’s
National Front was disbanded, and Tudeh sympathizers were relentlessly
pursued by a security agency (known from 1957 as SAVAK) that grew in-
creasingly efficient, with help from the CIA and the Israeli secret service,
Mossad. It also grew increasingly brutal. Two puppet political parties were
set up for the Majles, controlled by the shah’s supporters—Melliyun (Na-
tional Party) and Mardom (People’s Party)—satirized as the “Yes” party
and the “Yes sir” party.27 Important members of the ulema like Kashani,
and the prime marja-e taqlid Ayatollah Borujerdi, had supported the coup
of 1953 because they disliked what they saw as Mossadeq’s secularizing
tendency and the influence of Tudeh. Thereafter, they continued to sup-
port the shah, and relations between the shah and Borujerdi in particular
were cordial. But many other clerics grew more uneasy and hostile as time
went on.
The population of Iran had expanded from around 12 million at the be-
ginning of the century to 15 million in 1938, and 19.3 million in 1950; it
would jump to 27.3 million by 1968 and 33.7 million in 1976. Though the
regime invested heavily in industry and education, the rural areas still lagged
behind. There was also substantial private investment, and between 1954
and 1969 the economy grew on average by seven or eight percent a year.28 As
well as military expenditure, a lot of government money was spent on big,
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The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979 241

showy engineering projects, like dams—dams that sometimes never linked

up to the irrigation networks that had been their justification. As in any
other time of major change, the new often looked crass against the dignity of
the old that was being pushed aside, and the benefits of change were distrib-
uted unequally. But there was a general improvement in material standards
of living. The new, educated middle class expanded, encompassing entrepre-
neurs, engineers, and managers as well as the older professions—lawyers,
doctors, and teachers.
In 1957 a British diplomat with more than ordinary perspicacity wrote
the following of Tehran, prefiguring the tensions that came into higher relief
in the 1960s and 1970s—and making an early differentiation between the
character of the Westernized north of the city, and that of the more tradi-
tional, poorer south:

Here the mullahs preach every evening to packed audiences. Most of the ser-
mons are revivalist stuff of a high emotional and low intellectual standard. But
certain well known preachers attract the intelligentsia of the town with rea-
soned historical exposés of considerable merit. . . . The Tehran that we saw on
the tenth of Moharram [i.e. Ashura] is a different world, centuries and civili-
sations apart from the gawdy superficial botch of cadillacs, hotels, antique
shops, villas, tourists and diplomats, where we run our daily round . . . but it is
not only poverty, ignorance and dirt that distinguish the old south from the
parvenu north. The slums have a compact self-conscious unity and communal
sense that is totally lacking in the smart districts of chlorinated water,
macadamed roads and (fitful) street lighting. The bourgeois does not know
his neighbour: the slum-dweller is intensely conscious of his. And in the
slums the spurious blessings of Pepsi Cola civilisation have not yet destroyed
the old way of life, where every man’s comfort and security depend on the
spontaneous, un-policed observation of a traditional code. Down in the
southern part of the city manners and morals are better and stricter than in
the villas of Tajrish: an injury to a neighbour, a pass at another man’s wife, a
brutality to a child evoke spontaneous retribution without benefit of bar or
bench. 29
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242 A History of Iran

In 1960 the shah put forward a proposal for land reform, but by this time
the economy was slowing down, and the U.S. government (after January 1961
the Kennedy administration) was putting some pressure on the shah to liber-
alize. Many of the senior ulema disliked the land reform measure (their exten-
sive land holdings from endowments appeared to be threatened, and many
considered the infringement of property rights to be un-Islamic), and Boru-
jerdi declared a fatwa against it. The measure stalled. Prompted by the U.S.,
the lhah lifted the ban on the National Front, and their criticisms, along with
the economic problems, led to strikes and demonstrations. At the beginning
of 1963 the shah regained the initiative with a package of reforms announced
as the White Revolution. This included a renewed policy of land reform, pri-
vatization of state factories, female suffrage, and a literacy corps of young edu-
cated people to address the problem of illiteracy in the countryside. Despite a
boycott by the National Front (which insisted that such a measure should
have been presented and applied by a constitutionally elected Majles), the pro-
gram received huge support in a referendum—5.5 million out of 6.1 million
eligible voters supporting it.30 The program went ahead, augmenting and
broadening the changes in the country that were already afoot.
But early in 1963 a cleric little known outside ulema circles, Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini, began to preach in Qom against the shah’s govern-
ment. He attacked its corruption, its neglect of the poor, and its failure to
uphold Iran’s sovereignty in its relationship with the United States—and he
also disliked the shah’s sale of oil to Israel. Khomeini made this move at a
time when, following the death of Ayatollah Borujerdi in 1961, many Ira-
nian Shi‘a were unclear whom to follow as marja-e taqlid. In March, on the
anniversary of the martyrdom of the Emam Jafar Sadeq, troops and
SAVAK agents attacked the madreseh where Khomeini was preaching and
arrested him, killing several students at the same time. He was released
shortly afterward but continued his attacks on the government. He made a
particularly strong speech on June 3, which was Ashura, and was arrested
again two days later.31 When the arrest became known, there were demon-
strations in Tehran and several other major cities. Drawing force from the
intense atmosphere of mourning for Emam Hosein, these demonstrations
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The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979 243

were repeated, and they spread widely in the days that followed. The shah
imposed martial law and put troops on the streets, but hundreds of demon-
strators (at least) were killed before the protests ended. These deaths, espe-
cially because they took place at Ashura, invited comparison with the
martyrs of Karbala on the one hand, and the tyrant Yazid on the other.
Khomeini was released in August. But despite SAVAK announcements
that he had agreed to keep quiet, he continued to speak out, and he was rear-
rested. Finally, he was deported and exiled in 1964 after a harsh speech at-
tacking both the Iranian and U.S. governments for a new law that gave the
equivalent of diplomatic immunity to U.S. military personnel in Iran:

They have reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an Ameri-
can dog. If someone runs over a dog belonging to an American, he will be
prosecuted. Even if the Shah himself were to run over a dog belonging to an
American, he would be prosecuted. But if an American cook runs over the
Shah, the head of state, no one will have the right to interfere with him. . . .32

Shortly after the new law was passed in the Majles, a new U.S. loan of
$200 million for military equipment was agreed—a conjunction all too rem-
iniscent of the kinds of deals done with foreigners in the reign of Naser od-
Din Shah. Initially Khomeini went in exile to Turkey, then to Iraq, and
eventually (after the shah put pressure on the Iraqi government to remove
him from the Shi‘a center in Najaf ) to Paris in 1978. Protest in Iran died
down, aside from occasional manifestations at Tehran University and from
members of the ulema. For the shah, the message from the episode appeared
to be that he could govern autocratically and overcome short-term dissent
with repression. In the longer term, he believed, his policies for development
would bring benefits to ordinary people and secure his rule.

Khomeini
Ruhollah Khomeini was born in September 1902 in Khomein, a small town
between Isfahan and Tehran. He came from a family of seyyed (descendants
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244 A History of Iran

of the Prophet) whose patriarchs had been mullahs for many generations, and
may originally have come from Nishapur. In the eighteenth century one of his
ancestors had moved to India, where the family had lived in Kintur, near Luc-
know, before his grandfather—known as Seyyed Ahmad Musavi Hindi—
moved back to Persia and settled in Khomein in about 1839. He bought a large
house there and was a man of property and status. Ahmad’s son Mostafa stud-
ied in Isfahan, Najaf, and Samarra and married the daughter of a distinguished
clerical family. Mostafa belonged to the upper echelons of the ulema, a cut
above the mullahs who had to make a living as jobbing teachers, legal notaries,
or preachers. This made him an important figure in the area, and it seems that
it was while he was attempting to mediate in a local dispute that he was mur-
dered in 1903, when Ruhollah, his third son, was only six months old.33
Ruhollah grew up in Khomein through the turbulent years of the Consti-
tutional Revolution and the First World War, over which period Khomein
was raided a number of times by Lori tribesmen. In 1918 his mother died in
a cholera epidemic, leaving him an orphan as he was about to enter the sem-
inary nearby in Soltanabad. It may be that the absence of his father as a
child and becoming orphaned as a youth added impetus to the young
Khomeini’s ambition and drive to excel in his studies. Later he moved to
Qom, where as a student of Shaykh Abdolkarim Ha’eri he wore the black
turban of a seyyed. In Qom he received the conventional education in logic
and religious law of a mullah, becoming a mojtahed in about 1936.34 It was a
young age for such an accomplishment, and a sign of his promise. From that
time he began to teach and write. He was always a little unconventional,
having an interest in poetry and mysticism (erfan) that more conservative
mullahs would have disapproved of. He read Molla Sadra’s Four Journeys and
the Fusus al-Hikam of Ibn Arabi, and his first writings were commentaries on
mystical and philosophical texts. In the 1930s he studied philosophy and er-
fan with Mirza Mohammad Ali Shahabadi, who as well as being an author-
ity on mysticism believed in the importance of explaining religious ideas to
ordinary people in language they could understand. Shahabadi opposed the
rule of Reza Shah and also influenced Khomeini’s politics.35
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The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979 245

Khomeini had a strong sense of himself as well as the dignity of the

ulema as a class, and always dressed neatly and cleanly—not affecting an in-
difference to clothes or appearance as some young mullahs did. He struck
many people as aloof and reserved, and some as arrogant, but his small circle
of students and friends knew him to be generous and lively in private. For
his public persona as a teacher and mullah it was necessary for him to exem-
plify authority and quiet dignity. Through the 1940s and 1950s, as he con-
tinued to teach in Qom, it is perhaps correct to think of Khomeini as taking
a position between the anti-colonial and anti-British activism of Ayatollah
Kashani on the one hand, and the more conservative, withdrawn, quietist,
less politically interventionist stance of Ayatollah Hosein Borujerdi on the
other.36 But Khomeini’s combination of intellectual strength, curiosity, and
unconventionality made him different from either. Potentially more cre-
ative and innovative, he still for the time being deferred to his superiors in
the hierarchy of the ulema. Khomeini was made an ayatollah after the death
of Borujerdi in March 1961, by which time he was already attracting large
and increasing numbers of students to his lectures on ethics. He was re-
garded by some of them as their marja, their object of emulation.
The events of 1963–1964 made Khomeini the leading political figure
opposed to the shah—along with Mossadeq, who was still under house ar-
rest and thus effectively neutralized. Khomeini, though he disapproved of
constitutionalism in private, had been careful to speak positively about the
constitution in public.37 His attack on the new law governing the status of the
U.S. military was calculated to win over nationalists, some of whom might
previously have been suspicious of a cleric. Intellectuals like Al-e Ahmad gave
him their enthusiastic support. He was already applying the political
method by which, through addressing popular grievances and avoiding pro-
nouncements on issues that might divide his followers, he would later make
himself a national leader.
But from 1964 Khomeini was out of Iran and, to all appearances, out of
Iranian politics. In a sense, Iranian politics was itself exiled, taking place
among Iranian students and others living abroad. Within Iran the press was
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246 A History of Iran

controlled and censored, the elections continued to be rigged, and SAVAK

pursued, arrested, and imprisoned Tudeh activists and other dissidents.

Oil Boom and Expansion

The land reform program went ahead from 1963, but with mixed results.
The landlords who were to be expropriated were allowed to keep only one
village each, but some landlords were able to evade the provisions—by giv-
ing their property to relatives, for example, or by creating mechanized farms,
which were exempt. About two million peasants became landowners in their
own right for the first time, and some were able to set themselves up on a
profitable footing. But for many more the holdings they were given were too
small to make a living, and there were large numbers of agricultural laborers
who, because they had not had cultivation rights as sharecroppers before the
reform, were left out of the redistribution altogether. Because the reform
was accompanied by a general push for the mechanization of agriculture,
there was suddenly less work for these laborers anyway. The net result was
rural unemployment and an accelerating movement of people from the vil-
lages to the cities, especially Tehran, in search of jobs. It has been suggested
that the rate of internal migration reached eight percent per year in
1972–1973,38 and by 1976 Tehran had swelled to become a city of 4.5 mil-
lion people.
In Tehran these people went to poorer parts on the southern edge of the
city, to what were little better than shanty towns. They tended to settle
down in groups from the same village or area. Often they would know a
mullah also from the same area, and he would be accorded added authority
in the prevailing circumstances of dislocation and uncertainty.39
Between 1963 and the latter part of the 1970s, Iran enjoyed a huge eco-
nomic boom that saw per capita GNP rise from $200 to $2,000.40 Industrial
output increased dramatically in new industries like coal, textiles, and the
manufacture of motor vehicles, and large numbers of new jobs were created
to absorb the increase in population and the large numbers leaving agricul-
ture. Industrial wages were low, however. Government spending expanded
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The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979 247

education and health services too—the number of children in primary

schools went from 1.6 million in 1953 to more than 4 million in 1977; new
universities and colleges were set up and enrollment rose from 24,885 to
154,215. Students at foreign universities grew in number from fewer than
18,000 to more than 80,000. The number of hospital beds went from 24,126
to 48,000. Improved living conditions, sanitation, and health services all con-
tributed to a big drop in the infant mortality rate and a spurt in population
growth that continued until the 1990s. In the mid-1970s half the popula-
tion were under sixteen, and two-thirds were under thirty. This was to be
the generation of the revolution.41
Investment rose dizzyingly as Iran benefited from a windfall bonanza of
oil income—especially after the shah renegotiated terms with the oil con-
sortium to give himself more control over production levels and prices.
Then in 1973 the oil price doubled after the Yom Kippur war, and doubled
again at the end of the year when the shah led the other OPEC countries to
demand higher prices on the claim that oil had not kept pace with the price
of other internationally traded commodities. Yet more money pumped into
the system, though a large amount went back to the West—especially to the
United States and the United Kingdom—in return for quantities of new
military equipment. The shah bought more Chieftain tanks from the UK
than the British army owned, and the very latest F-14 fighters from the
United States.
But the economy was overheating, there was too much money chasing
too few goods, there were bottlenecks and shortages, and inflation rose
sharply—especially on items like housing rent and foodstuffs, and especially
in Tehran. Initially, the shah blamed small traders for the price rises, and
sent gangs (backed by SAVAK) into the bazaars to arrest so-called profi-
teers and hoarders. Shops were closed down, two hundred fifty thousand
fines were issued, and eight thousand shopkeepers were given prison sen-
tences—none of which altered the underlying economic realities by one
iota. The arrests and fines joined a list of grievances felt by the bazaari arti-
sans and merchants, who were already seeing their products and businesses
edged aside by imports, new factories, suburban stores, and supermarkets.
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248 A History of Iran

There was a sense, including in government, that the developing economy

had run out of control. In mid-1977 a new prime minister introduced a new,
deflationary economic policy designed to restore some stability. But the re-
sult was a sudden jump in unemployment, as the growing number of arrivals
in the cities either lost or failed to find jobs. Inflation and the sudden falter-
ing of the economy were felt particularly by the poor, but to some extent by
everyone. Rents were high for the middle-class engineers, managers, and
professionals in Tehran, and those with a stake in new businesses felt the
impact of deflation acutely.
Tehran in the 1970s was a strange place. Large numbers of very wealthy
people—many wealthy to a degree most Europeans could only dream of—
lived hard by people poorer than could be seen anywhere in western Europe.
The city was already largely a city of concrete, with only a core of a few older
palaces and government buildings. But despite the traffic and the ugliness,
the older Iran was still there in the chadors on the streets and the call to
prayer at dusk. The West, and especially the United States, were constant
presences, from the Coca-Cola and Pepsi on sale everywhere to American
cars and American advertising, but constant also (alongside continuing ad-
miration for America and an associated desire for economic development)
were a tension and a distaste for that American presence.
There were Americans everywhere in Tehran in the 1970s. Author and
professor James A. Bill has estimated that between 800,000 and 850,000
Americans lived in or visited Iran between 1944 and 1979, and that the
number resident there increased from fewer than 8,000 in 1970 to nearly
50,000 in 1979. Ten thousand were employed in defense industries around
Isfahan alone. There were of course some Americans living in Iran who
made an effort to understand the country, but many did not. For the most
part, the Americans lived entirely separate lives, often living on American-
only compounds and shopping in the U.S. commissary (the biggest of its
kind in the world). Many British expatriates lived in a similar way. The
American school in Tehran admitted only children with U.S. passports (un-
usual by comparison with American schools in other countries), and occa-
sional suggestions that the children be taught something about Iran
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The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979 249

generally failed—a school board member said in 1970 that the policy had
been “Keep Iran Out.” In the mid-1960s an American hospital in Tehran
took on some well-educated Iranian nurses to supplement its staff. The Ira-
nians were not allowed to speak in Persian, even among themselves, and
were excluded from the staff canteen, which was kept for U.S. citizens only.
The Iranian nurses had to eat in the janitor’s room. The hospital cared only
for American patients, and one day when a desperate Iranian father tried to
bring in his child, who had just been seriously injured by a car in the street
outside, he was sent away to find transport to another hospital. Other
Americans, notably those with the Peace Corps, worked alongside ordinary
Iranians and were much appreciated. But the majority were in Iran for the
money and the lavish lifestyle, which they could not have afforded at home:

As the gold rush began and the contracts increased, the American presence
expanded. The very best and the very worst of America were on display in the
cities of Iran. As time passed and the numbers grew, an increasingly high pro-
portion of fortune hunters, financial scavengers, and the jobless and disillu-
sioned recently returned from Southeast Asia found their way to Iran.
Companies with billion-dollar contracts needed manpower and, under time
pressure, recruited blindly and carelessly. In Isfahan, hatred, racism and igno-
rance combined as American employees responded negatively and aggressively
to Iranian society.42

Iranians returned the compliment. Incidents between U.S. residents and

Iranians led to newspaper articles about drunken and lewd Americans, en-
couraging anti-American attitudes.
There was also another kind of tension within Iranian society. The young
men of south Tehran, newly arrived from traditional communities in the
countryside and either having no jobs or only poorly paid ones, saw (if they
took a bus or taxi uptown) pretty young middle-class women sashaying up
and down the streets flush with money, unaccompanied or with girlfriends,
dressed in revealing Western fashions, flaunting their freedom, money,
beauty, and from a certain point of view immorality.43 On billboards, garish
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250 A History of Iran

depictions of half-dressed women advertised the latest films. Status, and the
lack of it, is not just about money; it is also about sex and desire. Tehran was
a place of aspiration, but in the late 1970s it became for many a place of re-
sentment, frustrated desire, and disappointed aspirations.
In an inspired passage Roy Mottahedeh described this time in Tehran as
the time of montazh, when imported things were being assembled and put
together in the city, often rather less than satisfactorily, and never quite com-
plete—a time when everything in Tehran seemed to be “intimately con-
nected with the airport”:

. . . in joking, Tehranis called all sorts of jerry-built Iranian versions of foreign

ideas true examples of Iranian montazh.44

The most obvious examples of montazh were the ubiquitous Paykan cars
assembled just outside Tehran from imported parts (to the design of the
British Hillman Hunter), but the same principle could be seen or imagined
at work elsewhere too: in corrupt property deals, in big buildings put up
without enough cement, in the chaotic traffic, and in the new plaques and
statues of the shah that appeared everywhere.
As the 1970s advanced, the political culture of the shah’s regime became
more repressive and hardened on the one hand, and more remote and attenu-
ated on the other. SAVAK had a new target in those years—radical move-
ments prepared to use violence against the regime. This notably included the
Marxist Feda’i and the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), both of
which fused Islam and Marxism. SAVAK expanded, and its use of torture be-
came routine. In 1975 Amnesty International pronounced the shah’s govern-
ment to be one of the world’s worst violators of human rights. The previous
two tame parties in the Majles became one, called Rastakhiz (Resurgence),
with a role simply to support and applaud the shah’s efforts. Politics became a
matter of who could be most sycophantic to the shah in public:

The Shah’s only fault is that he is really too good for his people—his ideas are
too great for us to realize them.45
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The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979 251

The shah himself rarely met ordinary Iranians. He went from place to
place by helicopter and, following various assassination attempts, viewed pa-
rades and other events from inside a special bulletproof glass box. In 1971 he
held an event at the historic sites of Persepolis and Pasargadae to celebrate,
supposedly, the twenty-five-hundredth anniversary of the Iranian monarchy.
This was folie de grandeur on a sublime scale. Heads of state from around the
world were invited, but those from monarchies were given precedence. So
Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was specially honored, while President Pompidou
of France was set low in the precedence order. Pompidou took umbrage and
sent his prime minister instead.46 Thousands dressed up as ancient Medes
and Persians, television coverage of the event was beamed around the world
by satellite, and the distinguished guests drank champagne and other im-
ported luxuries (the catering was laid on by Maxim’s of Paris in three huge
air-conditioned tents and fifty-nine smaller ones, and twenty-five thousand
bottles of wine were imported for the event—rumors of the overall cost
ranged as high as $200 million47). The shah made a speech claiming continu-
ity with Cyrus, and a rebirth of ancient Iranian greatness.
But the Achaemenids meant little to most Iranians—they had probably
never been to Persepolis, and what they knew of ancient Iran revolved
around the stories of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh rather than what might or might
not appear in Herodotus, or had been discovered at archaeological sites.
There had long been an anticlerical, secularizing strand of nationalist think-
ing that appealed to the pre-Islamic, monarchical tradition of Iran, but it was
a slender reed to carry this burden of regime self-projection. For most the Ira-
nian heritage was an Islamic heritage, and the jollifications at Persepolis left
them nonplussed. Khomeini denounced the event from Iraq, thundering that
Islam was fundamentally opposed to monarchy in principle, that the crimes
of Iranian kings had blackened the pages of history, and that even the ones re-
membered as good had in fact been “vile and cruel.”48 The shah also replaced
the Islamic calendar with a calendar that took year one as the year of the ac-
cession of Cyrus, which again left most Iranians irritated and baffled.
For some members of the minorities in Iran, the reign of Mohammad
Reza Shah was a good time of relative freedom and absence of persecution,
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252 A History of Iran

in which some Jews and Baha’is in particular were able—especially through

their cultural emphasis on education—to achieve a degree of prosperity. But
poorer Jews in some towns continued to suffer as second-class citizens,49 and
through this period many Iranian Jews emigrated to the United States and
Israel. The shah had passed a new Family Protection Law in 1967, which
made divorce law fairer and more equal, and in particular made child cus-
tody dependent on the merits of the case in court rather than simply giving
custody to the father.
The shah’s rule was a mixture of failures and successes—neither all one
nor all the other. Some of the vaunted economic and developmental achieve-
ments were impressive, while others were shallow and superficial. But in the
end the important failures were primarily political—the shah had no pro-
gram for restoring representative government, and his only solution for dis-
sent was repression. If he had succeeded in making the monarchy truly
popular, perhaps he could have sustained it for a time. Instead the monarchy
became more remote and disconnected from the attitudes and concerns of
ordinary Iranians. In a sense, paradoxically perhaps partly as a result of com-
bating underground Marxists for so long, the shah made the mistake of a
Marxist analysis: he thought that if he could just secure material prosperity
through successful development, then everything else would fall happily into
place. But few economies deliver continuous sustained growth indefinitely.
In 1977 the shah, if not actually under pressure from the new Carter ad-
ministration in the United States then certainly aware that the Carter people
were less sympathetic to repressive allies than their predecessors had been,
began slowly to relax some of the instruments of repression. In February
some political prisoners were released. Later on, court rules were changed to
allow prisoners proper legal representation and access to civilian rather than
military courts. The shah met representatives from Amnesty International
and agreed to improve prison conditions. In May a group of lawyers sent a
letter to the shah protesting at government interference in court cases. In
June three National Front activists, including Karim Sanjabi, Shahpur
Bakhtiar, and Dariush Foruhar, sent a bolder letter to the shah criticizing au-
tocratic rule and demanding a restoration of constitutional government.
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The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979 253

Later that month the Writers’ Association, repressed since 1964, resurrected
itself and pressed for the same goals—as well as for the removal of censor-
ship (many of the leading members were Tudeh sympathizers or broadly left-
ist). In July the shah replaced Amir Abbas Hoveyda, his prime minister for
twelve years, with Jasmshid Amuzegar, who was perceived to be more liberal.
In the autumn more political associations formed or re-formed—including
the National Front, under the leadership of Sanjabi, Bakhtiar, and Foruhar;
and the Freedom Movement, closely allied with the National Front, under
Mehdi Bazargan and Ebrahim Yazdi.50
On November 19 the Writers’ Association held a poetry evening—the
tenth in a series of such evenings—at the Goethe Institut. About ten thou-
sand students were present, and this time the police tried to break it up.
When the students poured into the streets to protest, the police attacked
them, killing one, injuring seventy, and arresting about a hundred. But on
this occasion civilian courts tried the students and quickly acquitted them.
While in exile, Khomeini kept up a stream of messages and speeches
critical of the regime, which were smuggled into Iran and distributed, often
using cassette tapes. Having developed his theory of opposition into a full-
blown theory for Islamic government, he set this out in a book, based on
lectures he gave in Najaf in 1970, with the title Hokumat-e Eslami: Velayat-e
Faqih (Islamic Government: Regency of the Jurist).51 In this text the Usuli
thinking of the previous two centuries—a line of thought that had helped
the ulema develop a hierarchy and had allowed them in effect to stand in
for the Hidden Emam—was developed to its logical extreme: permission
for the ulema to rule directly. This was the meaning of the term velayat-e
faqih, which needs explaining. A vali was a regent or deputy, someone repre-
senting the person with real authority—it was the title taken by Karim
Khan Zand in the eighteenth century, when he forbore to make himself
shah. Velayat meant regency, guardianship, or deputyship—or rather, by ex-
tension, the authority of the deputy or regent. The term faqih signifies a jurist,
an expert in Islamic law—fiqh. The logic of the concept was that the shari‘a,
derived from the word of God and the example of the Prophet, was there to
regulate human conduct, and was the only legitimate law. In the absence of
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254 A History of Iran

the Hidden Emam, the mojtaheds were the right people to interpret and ap-
ply the shari‘a. So obviously, they were the right people to rule, too. Who
else? From this point onward, Khomeini demanded the removal of the shah
and the establishment of Islamic government. He delivered clear and consis-
tent demands that the whole country could understand (at least they
thought they could—what exactly Islamic government might mean in prac-
tice remained less clear), and that increasingly made him the focal point for
opposition to the shah.
The principle of velayat-e faqih was not accepted by the ulema as a
whole—indeed not accepted by very many. But since the First World War
the ulema had been jostled and edged out of many of their traditional roles
of authority in society by the secularizing Pahlavi monarchy. Under Mo-
hammad Reza Shah the regime even attempted, in the late 1960s and 1970s
(as part of the White Revolution program), to replace the traditional ulema
with a new religious structure of mosques and mullahs answerable to the
state. There was little popular enthusiasm for the state religion (din-e
dawlat), but it succeeded in alienating the ulema as a whole even further
from the shah. Ayatollahs Montazeri and Taleqani were arrested and sen-
tenced to internal exile after disturbances at Tehran University and in Qom
in 1970–1972.52 But where Tudeh, the National Front, and the violent radi-
cals were battered and disrupted by years of conflict with SAVAK, the in-
formal nationwide network of mullahs and religious leaders—reaching into
every social class, every bazaar guild, and every village—was still there in the
late 1970s, as it had been in 1906. Its continuing presence reflected the en-
during power of this alternative source of authority in Shi‘a Iranian society.
In the theory of velayat-e faqih and Khomeini, the ulema had the defining
political principle and the leader that they had lacked in 1906.
By the end of 1977 the shah had alienated the ulema, alienated the
bazaaris, and had created a large, poor, deracinated working class in Tehran.
He had also alienated many of the educated middle classes—his natural
supporters—through his repression and abuses of human rights. Some of
these had in addition been radicalized by their experience of leftist politics
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The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979 255

in Europe in the late 1960s and 1970s. But there was another important in-
fluence on the thinking of this generation—Ali Shariati.
Shariati was born in 1933, near Sabzavar in Khorasan. He grew up to be a
lively, highly intelligent, extroverted youth with a strong sense of humor,
someone who enjoyed ridiculing his teachers. He was influenced by his fa-
ther, who had been an advocate of progressive Islam in his own right, but also
by writers like Hedayat and Western thinkers like Schopenhauer and Kafka.
Later Shariati went to Mashhad University, and then to Paris, where he stud-
ied under Marxist professors, read Guevara and Sartre, communicated with
the Martinique-born theorist and revolutionary activist Frantz Fanon, and
took a doctorate in sociology (in 1964). His political activism also attracted
the attention of SAVAK. Returning to Iran in 1965, he taught students in
Mashhad and later in Tehran, attracting large numbers to his lectures, and
wrote a series of important books and speeches. The general message was that
Shi‘ism provided its own ideology of social justice and resistance to oppres-
sion. This had been masked by a false Shi‘ism of superstition and deference to
monarchy (Black Shi‘ism, Safavid Shi‘ism), but the essential truths of the reli-
gion were timeless, centering on the martyrdom of Hosein and his compan-
ions. Shariati was not a Marxist, but he could be said to have recast Shi‘a Islam
in a revolutionary mold, comparable to the Marxist model: “Everywhere is
Karbala and every day is Ashura.”53 For the shah’s regime, he was too hot to
handle. He was imprisoned in 1972, released in 1975, kept under house ar-
rest, and allowed to go to England in 1977. He died there that June, appar-
ently of a heart attack, though many Iranians believe he was murdered by
SAVAK. Khomeini would never endorse Shariati’s thinking directly, but was
careful never to condemn it either. Shariati’s radical Islamism, both fully Ira-
nian and fully modern, was a strong influence on the generation of students
that grew to adulthood in the 1970s.54
Through the inflation and the economic slump and deflation that fol-
lowed, many Iranians—including well-off ones—had come to doubt their
assumptions about steady growth and economic security. There had also
been a number of incidents in which the shah had made himself look foolish
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256 A History of Iran

or out of touch—the latest came on his visit to Washington at the end of

1977, when TV cameras caught him clinking champagne glasses with Presi-
dent Carter and weeping from tear gas on the White House lawn when the
wind blew the wrong way from a nearby demonstration against his visit. An
autocrat can get away with many things, but looking foolish undercuts him
in the most damaging way.

Revolution
In January 1978 an article appeared in the paper Ettela’at, attacking the clergy
and Khomeini as “black reactionaries.” The article had been written by
someone trusted by the regime and approved by the court, but had been re-
fused by the more independently edited paper Kayhan. It twisted facts and
invented fictions, suggesting that Khomeini was a foreigner (from his grand-
father’s birth in India and name, Hindi), a former British spy, and a poet
(the last was true, and was intended to detract from his clerical seriousness
because most ulema, with some backing from the Qor’an, disapproved of
poetry).55 The article immediately prompted a protest demonstration in
Qom, in which thousands of religious students heaped abuse on the “Yazid
government” and demanded an apology, a constitution, and the return of
Khomeini. There were clashes with the police and a number of students
were shot dead. The following day Khomeini, by now in Paris, praised the
courage of the students and called for more demonstrations. Ayatollah
Shari‘atmadari, one of the most senior marjas at the time, condemned the
shootings.
After a traditional mourning period of forty days, the bazaars and univer-
sities closed, and there were peaceful demonstrations in twelve cities, includ-
ing in Tabriz, where again the police fired on the crowd, causing more
deaths. The forty-day rhythm continued, like a great revolutionary lung,
with the almost unanimous support of the ulema (though many of the cler-
ics called for mourners to attend the mosques rather than to demonstrate).
The demonstrations grew larger and more violent, with slogans like “death
to the shah.” After the end of May there was a lull (among other reasons, Ay-
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The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979 257

atollah Shari‘atmadari had urged people against further street demonstra-

tions to avoid more deaths), but there was a violent incident in Mashhad in
July where police fired on a crowd. On August 19 the Rex Cinema burned
down in Abadan, an incident that is still controversial. About 370 people
died in the fire. Government and opposition both accused each other, but
events, trials, and investigations in later years indicate that a radical Islamic
group with connections to ulema figures was responsible.56 At the time, the
mood was such that most blamed SAVAK.
By that time the demonstrations, which up to then had largely been an
affair for middle-class students and members of the traditional bazaari mid-
dle class, were being augmented by strikes and other actions by factory
workers—prompted by the government’s deflationary policies.57 In August
there were many large demonstrations in the month of Ramadan, and more
in early September. The shah’s government banned the demonstrations and
imposed martial law, but on September 8 there were huge protests in Tehran
and other cities. Barricades were set up in the working-class areas of south
Tehran. The government sent in tanks and helicopter gunships; the people
on the barricades responded with Molotov cocktails. In Jaleh Square an un-
armed crowd refused to disperse and were gunned down where they stood.
September 8 was thereafter called Black Friday, and the deaths increased
the bitterness of the people toward the shah to such a pitch that compro-
mise became impossible. All that was left was the implacable demand that
the shah should go—the demand upon which Khomeini had insisted since
1970. By the autumn most other opposition groups had allied themselves to
Khomeini and his program. Karim Sanjabi and Mehdi Bazargan flew to
Paris, met with Khomeini, and declared their support for him in the name
of the National Front and the Freedom Movement. Demonstrations and ri-
ots continued. The shah, by now increasingly ill with cancer, though this re-
mained unknown to the public, veered between more repression and
concessions, including the release of political prisoners and the dissolution
of the Rastakhiz party. He appeared on television to say that he understood
the message of the people, would hold free elections, and would atone for
past mistakes.58
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258 A History of Iran

But it was all too late. As autumn went into winter, more and more work-
ers spent more and more time on strike. The violence intensified again at the
beginning of Moharram in December. In Qazvin, 135 demonstrators died
when tanks drove over them. On the day of Ashura itself, December 11,
more than one million people demonstrated in the streets of Tehran. After
Ashura, street gangs roamed the capital at will. There were more and more
signs that the army, which had experienced mass desertions, was no longer
reliable. By this time, President Carter’s support for the shah was clearly on
the wane, and many Americans were leaving Iran after attacks on U.S.-
owned offices and even the U.S. Embassy. The shah had lost control. On
January 16, 1979, he left the country. On February 1, Khomeini flew back to
Tehran.
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8
Iran Since the
Revolution
Islamic Revival, War, and Confrontation

When the existence of the Church is threatened, she is released from

the commandments of morality. With unity as the end, the use of
every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, simony,
prison, death. For all order is for the sake of the community, and the
individual must be sacrificed to the common good.
—Dietrich of Nieheim, Bishop of Verden, 1411
(quoted by Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon)

In the Air France passenger jet that Ayatollah Khomeini took from Paris to
Tehran—before it was even clear that the aircraft would be allowed to
land—a Western journalist asked him what his feelings were about return-
ing to Iran. He replied Hichi—“nothing.”1 This grumpy response to unimag-
inative journalism did not demonstrate a deep indifference to Iran or the
well-being of the Iranian people, as has sometimes been claimed. Khomeini’s
reply has a gnomic quality that challenges interpretation.
Whether one approves of Khomeini or not, it is indisputable that when
he arrived in Tehran on February 1, 1979, he was the focal point of the

259
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260 A History of Iran

hopes of a whole nation. In some sense they reflected him and he them—at
that moment, at least. It may be that the euphoric crowds welcoming him
numbered as many as three million. This was in accordance with Kho-
meini’s sense of himself—his idea of spiritual development was that of Ibn
Arabi’s Perfect Man.2 Through contemplation, religious observance, and dis-
cipline, his aim was to approach the point at which his inner world reflected
the world beyond himself—and, in turn, reflected and became a channel for
the mind of God. As he left the aircraft, his car made its difficult way
through the crowds from the airport to the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery for
Khomeini to honor the martyrs killed in the demonstrations of the last few
months. As he passed, the people chanted not just “Allahu Akbar” (God is
Great) but also “Khomeini, O Emam.” In Shi‘a mysticism (erfan), the Emam

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Iran Since the Revolution 261

and the Perfect Man were one and the same. No human being since the dis-
appearance of the Twelfth Emam had been acclaimed with the title Emam
(many senior ulema never accepted the title for Khomeini).3 The followers
and the crowds were not saying directly that Khomeini was the Hidden
Emam returned to earth, but it was very close to it. Centuries before, the
Arab poet Farazdaq saw the fourth Emam at Mecca, and afterward wrote:

He lowers his gaze out of modesty. Others lower their gaze for awe of him. He
is not spoken to except when he smiles.4

This is why Khomeini answered the pushy journalist on the aircraft as he

did. The mojtahed on the path to becoming the Perfect Man had no place
for feelings or the manifestation of feelings. He was at one with the crowds,
and they with him, and both with God. Or so they believed.
The revolution of 1979 was not solely—and perhaps not even pri-
marily—a religious revolution. Economic slump and middle-class disillu-
sionment with the corruption and oppression of a regime many had
previously supported were important factors, as was a nationalistic dislike of
the unequal relationship with the United States. But the revolution drew
great strength from its Shi‘a form, which lent cohesion and a sense of com-
mon purpose to disparate elements—even those that were not overtly reli-
gious—and from the clarity and charisma of Khomeini, which albeit
temporarily gave an otherwise disunited collection of groups and motiva-
tions a center and a unity. Unlike other revolutions in history—notably the
Bolshevik revolution of 1917— the Iranian revolution was genuinely a
people’s revolution. The actions of a large mass of people were crucial to the
outcome, and the immediate outcome, if not the longer-term result, was a
genuine expression of the people’s will.
In his last weeks the shah had appointed the National Front leader Sha-
pur Bakhtiar as prime minister, and Bakhtiar had announced a program of
measures in an attempt to restore constitutional government and some sta-
bility, including free elections (Bakhtiar had been imprisoned by the shah
for several years at different times since 1953). But the National Front had
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262 A History of Iran

disowned Bakhtiar, and Khomeini had pronounced his government illegal.

Maintaining this line, upon his arrival Khomeini on February 5 appointed
his own prime minister from the Freedom Movement, Mehdi Bazargan.
Revolutionary Committees (Komitehs) were set up and began cooperating
with deserters from the military, Tudeh, the Feda’i, and the MKO to take
arms and attack buildings associated with the regime, including police sta-
tions and the SAVAK’s notorious Evin prison. After a last stand by some
members of the Imperial guard, on February 11 the military gave in and an-
nounced that they would remain neutral.5 Bakhtiar resigned and went into
hiding; he left the country two months later. From that point on, the revolu-
tionaries were in control. The Komitehs rounded up senior figures of the
Pahlavi regime, and a revolutionary tribunal operating out of a school class-
room had them executed, including, on February 15, the former head of
SAVAK, General Nassiri. Khomeini himself headed a Revolutionary
Council that maintained contact with the Komitehs through the connec-
tions between mullahs. In that way he began inexorably to remove all rivals
to his vision for the future of the country.
Komitehs were set up all over Iran, but not all of them were so suscepti-
ble to Khomeini’s central control. In the northwest in particular, with its
own regional and leftist tradition, revolutionary enthusiasm turned toward
a drive for greater regional autonomy. Kurdistan plunged into outright re-
bellion and separatism. In the 1970s the shah had supported the Kurds in
Iraq in armed resistance against the Iraqi government, but his support was
intended only as leverage to pressure the Iraqis into concessions elsewhere.
He dropped the Kurds as soon as it was convenient for him, and the Kurds
in Iraq suffered terribly as their revolt was crushed. The episode again stim-
ulated Kurdish nationalism, which had motivated previous separatist
movements within Iran in the 1920s—under the charismatic leader
Simko/Simitqu—and again in the 1940s. Of the many ethnic and religious
minorities of Iran, the Kurds are the group with the most developed sense
of a separate national identity, with strong links to the Kurds of Iraq,
Turkey, and Syria. The Kurdish insurrection in Iran that followed the revo-
lution was eventually crushed, but not without more bitter suffering—pre-
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Iran Since the Revolution 263

figuring the even worse treatment that was visited on the Kurds of Iraq
later in the 1980s.
Even before he returned to Iran, Khomeini had been making speeches
critical of the shah’s leftist opponents. At the end of March 1979 he set the
seal on the removal of the shah and the establishment of a state based on
Islamic principles with a referendum that returned ninety-seven percent
support for the establishment of an Islamic republic. In May Khomeini es-
tablished the Revolutionary Guard Corps (Sepah-e Pasdaran) as a reliable
military force to balance the army and to supplement the gangs of street
fighters that became known as Hezbollah—the party of God. The extensive
property of the shah’s Pahlavi Foundation was transferred to a new
Bonyad-e Mostazefin (Foundation for the Oppressed), which became a vehi-
cle both for the projection of the regime’s social policies and for political
patronage.
The executions of old regime members shocked moderates and liberals
(including Bazargan), as well as many of those around the world who had
initially welcomed the fall of the shah. The killings stopped for a time in
mid-March, but continued again in April, when Hoveyda was shot. Khome-
ini had initially called for moderation, but acquiesced to the pressure from
young radicals urging revenge for the deaths of the previous year. The young
Islamic radicals were his weapon against the rival groups that had partici-
pated in the revolution.6 In April and May Khomeini was given a sharp re-
minder of the seriousness of the struggle and the consequences of failure,
when several of his close supporters, including notably Morteza Motahhari,
were assassinated.
The Shi‘a ulema had probably never been as powerful as it was at the mo-
ment Khomeini returned from exile. But Khomeini was something of a par-
venu among the senior ulema, and the Islamic regime he created reflected
his highly individual personality at least as much as it did the nature of tra-
ditional Shi‘ism. At the time of the revolution there were other senior fig-
ures who commanded great respect, but who were pushed aside by the
enormous popularity of Khomeini immediately after his return from exile.
The most prominent of these was Ayatollah Seyyed Kazem Shari‘atmadari,
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264 A History of Iran

who argued for a more moderate line in 1979 and was quickly silenced.
Some of his supporters were executed. Khomeini later rescinded Shari‘at-
madari’s status as marja-e taqlid—a wholly unprecedented step. The princi-
ple of velayat-e faqih was still a dubious novelty for many senior Shi‘a figures,
several of whom spoke out against it in 1980–1981. But they too were in-
timidated into silence. Khomeini and his supporters successfully consoli-
dated their control, based on the principle of velayat-e faqih, but it never
commanded universal support among the Iranian ulema.7 A reassertion of
Islamic values followed—including a reappearance of ulema as judges, and a
reapplication of shari‘a law. Although this has been moderated in some re-
spects by laws passed centrally, some extreme practices like stoning for adul-
tery (though infrequent) have continued and have attracted international
criticism.
By the autumn of 1979 the liberals and moderates were looking increas-
ingly marginalized. Over the summer, Khomeini had formed the Islamic
Republic Party (IRP), and the first draft of the constitution, put together by
Bazargan—similar to the constitution of 1906, minus the monarch—had
been radically rewritten by the Assembly of Experts, which was dominated
by ulema loyal to Khomeini. The Assembly of Experts had come together
after an election marred by liberal and leftist boycotts and allegations of rig-
ging. In its final form the constitution set up the system that still runs Iran
today, and which still reflects Khomeini’s idea of velayat-e faqih: that day-to-
day government should be secular, but with ultimate power in the hands of
a religious leader committed to Islamic government. The constitution set up
an elected presidency, an elected Majles, and elected municipal councils, but
it also established a Council of Guardians (twelve clerics and jurists) to vet
and approve candidates before they could run for election, and to approve or
veto legislation passed by the Majles. Above all, it confirmed Khomeini him-
self, and his successors, in the supreme position in the constitution. He had
the right to appoint half the members of the Guardian Council, to approve
the appointment of the president, and to appoint the head of the Revolu-
tionary Guard Corps and the other heads of the armed forces. While
Khomeini used the constitution to consolidate his gains, he was prepared
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Iran Since the Revolution 265

throughout to use violent, extra-legal means to secure his ends, to take and
keep the political initiative, and leave his opponents to debate over the rights
and wrongs of what had happened. This last was a principle he claimed to
have taken from the clerical politician of the 1920s, Modarres: “You hit first
and let others complain. Don’t be the victim and don’t complain.”8
Press freedom was also curtailed over the summer, in a concerted cam-
paign. Hezbollah attacked newspaper offices, as well as the offices of politi-
cal parties, forty newspapers closed down, and two of the biggest—Ettela’at
and Kayhan—were taken over by the Bonyad-e Mostazefin. At the same
time SAVAK, after the removal of its chiefs and officers by one means or an-
other, was slowly being turned into an agency of the Islamic state (along
with Evin prison). In 1984 it was renamed the Ministry of Intelligence and
Security (MOIS).
In November 1979, prompted by the news that the shah had been al-
lowed into the United States for treatment of his cancer (which finally killed
him in July 1980), students broke into the U.S. Embassy and took the diplo-
mats there hostage. Initially people thought this was just another student
demonstration (something similar had happened in February), but when
Khomeini backed the students and a continuation of the hostage crisis,
Bazargan and his fellow Freedom Movement politicians resigned. Early in
1980 a new president, Abol-Hasan Bani Sadr, was elected under the new con-
stitutional arrangements. He had general support, including from middle-
class liberals. For the next year and a half he strove to resolve the hostage
crisis, and to uphold principles of conventional legality and secular govern-
ment. But like Bazargan before him, he ultimately failed and in 1981 was
impeached by Khomeini.
Khomeini meanwhile exploited the hostage crisis to preserve a revolu-
tionary fluidity and sense of crisis that enabled him to wrong-foot his oppo-
nents. He ordered purges to remove civil servants who were suspected of
secularist or antirevolutionary attitudes, closed the universities to eject left-
ists and impose Islamic principles (they reopened, initially on a much re-
duced basis, in 1982), and used the Komitehs and Hezbollah to force
women to wear the veil. The sense of continuing crisis was only enhanced by
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266 A History of Iran

President Carter’s attempt to send helicopters to rescue the hostages in

April 1980. The humiliation of the hostage crisis, the failed rescue, and the
subsequent failure of Carter’s reelection campaign all combined to entrench
in ordinary Americans a hostile attitude to Iran that still hampers attempts
at rapprochement between the two countries. (The hostages were eventually
released just after Carter left office in January 1981.) Most Iranians, includ-
ing radicals who supported the action at the time and some who partici-
pated in it, today agree that taking the hostages was a bad mistake.
In the early years of the revolution Khomeini and the IRP had to fight off
some formidable enemies, both internal and external. But in each case, true
to his guiding principles, it tended to be Khomeini who took the initiative,
hitting his opponents with preemptive strikes—at least his internal adver-
saries. It has been argued that terror and repression were forced on the Ira-
nian revolutionaries—who otherwise would have been humane and
tolerant—by the turn of events, the pressure of war, and the viciousness of
their enemies. But this argument does not stand up to scrutiny. Although he
was reacting to events in a supple way, from the beginning Khomeini was
fully aware that if he allowed his enemies to take the initiative, he might not
get a second chance. He ruthlessly eliminated his opponents.
The two most serious challenges were from the MKO and Saddam Hos-
sein. Having initially supported the revolution, the MKO were attacked by
Khomeini in November 1980 (he labelled them monafeqin, the hypocrites—
a term that recalled those who had apostatized after declaring loyalty to the
Prophet Mohammad). He had their leader imprisoned for ten years on a
charge of spying for the Soviet Union,9 and Hezbollahis attacked the group’s
headquarters. The MKO fought back with demonstrations and street vio-
lence, and then with bombs, managing to kill many of Khomeini’s support-
ers before their leadership was driven into exile. Two bombs at the
headquarters of the IRP in June 1981 killed some seventy of Khomeini’s
closest companions and advisers, including his right-hand man, Ayatollah
Beheshti. Large numbers of MKO supporters were killed (as many as sev-
eral thousand, some of them executed publicly) or imprisoned.10 From exile,
at first in Paris and later in Iraq, the MKO kept up its opposition and its vi-
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Iran Since the Revolution 267

olent attacks. But in time it dwindled to take on the character of a paramili-

tary cult, largely subordinated to the interests of the Baathist regime in Iraq.
Khomeini and his supporters had also been fighting moves for autonomy
in Azerbaijan, and the armed rebellion by the Kurdish Democratic Party
(KDP) in Iranian Kurdistan, a rebellion not finally crushed until 1984. The
last major political group not aligned to Khomeini and his followers were
Tudeh, with whom most of the Feda’i had allied themselves after a split.
They had supported Khomeini on the wooden-headed Marxist basis that
the revolution of 1979 was a petty-bourgeois revolution that would be a
prelude to a socialist one. In 1983 Khomeini turned on Tudeh, accusing
them of spying for the Soviets and plotting to overthrow the Islamic regime.
Seventy leading members were arrested; there were some executions and tel-
evised confessions. Tudeh and the Feda’i were banned, leaving the IRP and
the small Freedom Party as the only ones still permitted to operate. The
Freedom Party continues to this day in very restricted circumstances under
its leader Ebrahim Yazdi.

War
In September 1980 Saddam Hossein’s forces invaded Iran, beginning an
eight-year war and intensifying pressure on the Iranian regime. Opinion dif-
fers over the origins of the Iran/Iraq war—whether Saddam opportunisti-
cally attacked Iran at a moment of perceived Iranian weakness, in the hope
of snatching some quick gains in the Shatt-al Arab and elsewhere (attempt-
ing to put right a border dispute that had been resolved unfavorably for Iraq
in the previous decade) or whether Iranian religious/revolutionary propa-
ganda in 1979/1980, apparently directed at starting a revolution among Iraqi
Shi‘as and destroying his regime, left him little choice. But Saddam was the
aggressor, invading and occupying Iranian territory. By the end of that im-
mensely destructive war, Iranian talk of exporting religious revolution (one of
the few concrete results of which was the Iranian contribution to the estab-
lishment of Hezbollah in Lebanon in the early 1980s) had faded. As many as
one million Iranians were killed or injured, and a whole generation was
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268 A History of Iran

stamped anew with the symbolism of Shi‘a martyrdom. In addition to the

regular army and the Pasdaran, large numbers of Basij volunteers were re-
cruited, including boys as young as twelve. The regime constantly harped on
Ashura, Hosein, and Karbala to maintain support for the war and to moti-
vate the troops. The huge casualties on the Iranian side resulted partly from
the human wave tactics they employed against the Iraqis, who were normally
better equipped. The technological imbalance was the result of the policy of
Western nations who, despite their declared neutrality, sent a variety of up-to-
date weapons to the Iraqis while keeping the Iranians starved of spare parts for
the weapons the shah had bought in the previous decade. The arsenal sup-
plied to Iraq included chemical weapon technology that was used against Ira-
nian soldiers as well as Kurdish civilians in the north of Iraq, whom Saddam
treated as rebels. The war also had the effect of physically dividing Iranian
Shi‘as from the shrine cities of Najaf, Karbala, and Samarra.
Iraqi gains at the outset of the war, which caused huge damage in
Khuzestan and the flight of hundreds of thousands of refugees, were wiped
out by an Iranian counteroffensive in the spring of 1982, which recaptured
Khorramshahr and forced Saddam to withdraw to the border. But the Irani-
ans then amplified their war aims, demanding the removal of Saddam and
huge war reparations. Thereafter it was the turn of the Iraqis to go on the
defensive, but the Iranians were able to make only minor territorial gains,
the most notable being the capture of the Fao peninsula in February 1986.
The hope of a Shi‘a uprising to support the Iranian attacks in southern Iraq
proved an illusion—like Saddam’s hope of an Arab uprising in Khuzestan
in 1980—and the land war became a stalemate.
Beginning in 1984 Saddam attacked Iranian shipping in the Persian Gulf,
trying to damage Iran’s oil exports. The Iranians responded in kind, resulting
in what became known as the Tanker War. The United States and other
noncombatant nations moved ships into the Persian Gulf to protect ship-
ping in international waters, but in July 1988 a U.S. warship, USS Vincennes,
under a disastrously gung-ho commander, sailed into Iranian territorial wa-
ters in pursuit of some Iranian gunboats and after a series of bungles shot
down an Iranian civilian airliner with a pair of surface-to-air missiles, killing
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Iran Since the Revolution 269

290. The Reagan administration gave explanations that contained more

misleading inaccuracies and self-justifications than contrition, and later
awarded the commander of Vincennes a campaign medal. Many Iranians still
believe that the destruction of the airliner was not an accident but a deliber-
ate act. Another less-than-glorious episode in the U.S./Iran relationship
took place earlier, in 1986, when U.S. officials brought a pallet of spare parts
for Iran’s Hawk ground-to-air missiles from Israel to Tehran (plus a choco-
late birthday cake from a kosher bakery in Tel Aviv and other presents) in
what later became known as the Iran/Contra affair. The exposure and fail-
ure of the venture stood as another warning of the perils of making contact
between the two countries, and of the divide of misunderstanding between
them.11
As stalemate prevailed in the land war, the Iranians and Iraqis bombarded
each other’s capitals and other towns indiscriminately with long-range mis-
siles, and with bombs dropped from aircraft, killing many civilians (the War
of the Cities). Toward the end, Iraq had the upper hand in these exchanges,
and in the land war was able to retake Iraqi territory at Fao and elsewhere,
bringing the front line back almost exactly to where it had been in Septem-
ber 1980. Finally, with the terrible cost of the war mounting and no sign of
the dream of a March to Karbala being realized, Khomeini was persuaded
by Majles Speaker Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani to accept what Khomeini
called the chalice of poison. Rafsanjani, perhaps right for the wrong reason,
had used the Vincennes incident to insist that the United States would never
allow Iran to succeed in the war. Khomeini allowed President Khamenei
(elected in 1981 and reelected in 1985) to announce in July 1988 that Iran
would accept UN resolution 598, which called for a cease-fire.

Death and Reconstruction

Khomeini died on June 3, 1989, and his funeral at the Behesht-e Zahra
cemetery drew crowds and scenes of mass emotion comparable only with
those that had greeted his return from exile ten years before. At one point
the coffin had to be rescued by helicopter from distraught mourners seeking
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270 A History of Iran

pieces of his shroud as relics. Khomeini’s last months had been overshad-
owed by the hard decision to end the war with Iraq, and this may have af-
fected his health, but he was also suffering from cancer and heart disease.
One significant event in these last months was what is conventionally called
the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in February 1989 (some have suggested it
would be more accurately described as a hokm—a religious judgment). It
seems that Khomeini had been made aware of Rushdie’s book The Satanic
Verses some months earlier, but had dismissed it as unimportant (he had not
even banned it from being imported). Reconsidering the question later—af-
ter demonstrations by Muslims in Britain and riots in Kashmir and Paki-
stan—he then delivered the fatwa as a deliberate act, to reassert his and
Iran’s claim to the leadership of Islam.12 It was another classic Khomeini
move, one that trumpeted Iran’s Islamic and revolutionary uniqueness. But
it also made more difficulties for those who might have wanted to bring Iran
out of isolation into some kind of normality.
Another event occurred in these last months that illustrates again the
degree to which Khomeini had been (and remained) an enigma even
among the ulema. Early in January 1989 Khomeini sent a letter to the So-
viet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, observing accurately that communism now
belonged in the museum of history. Before he fell into the snare of material-
istic capitalism, Khomeini said, Gorbachev should study Islam as a way of
life. At first impression this seems an odd suggestion, but perhaps Khome-
ini sensed an affinity with Gorbachev—as an unconventional thinker
hemmed in by unsympathetic and less imaginative minds. The form of Islam
that Khomeini recommended upset many of his ulema colleagues—he com-
mended to Gorbachev not the Qor’an nor any of the conventional works
but instead the writings of Ibn Arabi, Avicenna, and Sohravardi. With the
letter he sent three of his closest companions and pupils, versed in Islamic
mysticism. Whatever his private thoughts, Gorbachev thanked them and
expressed his pride at having received a personal letter from the Emam. But
the letter attracted criticism from clergy in Qom, some of whom upbraided
Khomeini in an open letter for having recommended mystics and philoso-
phers. Khomeini responded with a “letter to the clergy” that vented the
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Iran Since the Revolution 271

frustrations of a long life spent enduring the criticism of more tradition-

minded mullahs:

This old father of yours has suffered more from stupid reactionary mullahs
than anyone else. When theology meant no interference in politics, stupidity
became a virtue. If a clergyman was able, and aware of what was going on [in
the world around him], they searched for a plot behind it. You were consid-
ered more pious if you walked in a clumsy way. Learning foreign languages
was blasphemy, philosophy and mysticism were considered to be sin and infi-
delity. . . . Had this trend continued, I have no doubt the clergy and seminaries
would have trodden the same path as the Christian Church did in the Middle
Ages.13

Before the revolution, ascent through the ranks of the mojtaheds had
been an informal process, but through the 1980s it became much more
structured—policed and controlled by Khomeini and his followers.14 As the
hierarchy of Iranian Shi‘ism came under control, so did doctrine: Khomeini
was attempting to create out of the previous plurality a conformism to a sin-
gle idea of Shi‘ism. In the 1990s this development went further. Examina-
tions were set up for aspiring mojtaheds, and political loyalty—and
adherence to the velayat-e faqih—became more important than piety, depth
of religious understanding, intellectual strength, or the approval of a loose
group of senior clerics, as had previously been the case. A new group of po-
litical ayatollahs, selected in this new way, proliferated.15 Others, more de-
serving in traditional terms, remained mere mojtaheds.
This meant that the revolution had instituted a religion controlled by the
state and subordinated to state interests. The situation was oddly similar,
from that perspective, to the din-e dawlat the shah had earlier attempted as
part of the White Revolution—with the difference that this state was
headed by a mojtahed rather than a monarch. By the mid to late 1990s some
independent voices warned of the dangers of the new order. Notable among
them was the thinker and theologian Abdolkarim Soroush, who called for a
secular government and predicted that, otherwise, the compromises and
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272 A History of Iran

hypocrisies of politics and government would discredit religion in Iran and

alienate the young.16 This is precisely what has happened. The corollary has
been an underground resurgence among intellectuals of the nationalism of
the 1920s and 1930s pattern, idealizing pre-Islamic Iran and blaming fail-
ures of development on the Arab conquest—appearing, ironically, to cele-
brate the Cyrus-nostalgia most had rejected from the lips of the last shah.17
Another voice to take a similar line has been Ayatollah Montazeri.18 After
the death of Beheshti, Montazeri had emerged in the 1980s as the figure
most likely to succeed Khomeini as Supreme Leader. Montazeri had been a
loyal supporter of Khomeini, and an important theorist for the principle of
velayat-e faqih. But toward the end of the 1980s he fell out with Khomeini.
The details of this are not entirely clear. Montazeri certainly sent a brave let-
ter to Khomeini protesting the massacre in prison of thousands of political
prisoners, mainly former members of the MKO. The massacre followed a fi-
nal, absurd, doomed offensive by MKO military units from Iraq into Iranian
territory just after the July 1988 cease-fire. Montazeri’s letter to Khomeini
was published:

Three days ago, a religious judge from one of the provinces, who is a trust-
worthy man, visited me in Qom to express concern about the way your re-
cent orders have been carried out. He said that an intelligence officer, or a
prosecutor—I don’t know which—was interrogating a prisoner to deter-
mine whether he still maintained his [old] position. Was he prepared to
condemn the hypocrite organisation [the Mojahedin]? The prisoner said
“Yes.’” Was he prepared to take part in a [television] interview? “Yes,” said the
prisoner. Was he prepared to go to the front to fight the Iraqis? “Yes,” he said.
Was he prepared to walk into a minefield? The inmate replied that not
everyone was prepared to walk over mines and, furthermore, the newly con-
verted could not be expected to do so. The inmate was told that it was clear
that he still maintained his [old] position, and he was duly dealt with. The
religious judge’s insistence that a decision should be based on a unanimous,
not a majority, vote fell on deaf ears. He said that intelligence officials have
the largest say everywhere and in practice influence others. Your Holiness
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Iran Since the Revolution 273

might take note of how your orders, that concern the lives of thousands of
people, are carried out.19

Some believe that the real rift was over the Iran/Contra arms deal—that
Montazeri was left in the dark over the discussions with the United States
and reacted badly when he found out. He also criticized the fatwa against
Rushdie, saying that foreigners were getting the impression that Iranians
were interested only in murdering people. Whatever the details, shortly be-
fore Khomeini’s death in June 1989 it was made known that Montazeri
would not follow Khomeini as Supreme Leader. Instead, Khomeini’s close
confidant Ali Khamenei took the role, having been promoted suddenly from
hojjatoleslam to ayatollah—despite having had no very distinguished reputa-
tion as a scholar previously (several senior ayatollahs protested at
Khamenei’s elevation, with the extraordinary result that he became
Supreme Leader but only a marja for Shi‘as outside Iran). Since that time
Montazeri has lived mainly under house arrest, and has made several state-
ments against the conduct of the regime—arguing for a more limited role
for the velayat-e faqih, for properly constitutional and democratic govern-
ment, and an end to human rights abuses.
Despite the efforts of the regime to marginalize him, Montazeri is still
the marja-e taqlid for many religious Iranians, along with others who keep a
certain distance from the regime. Another important example is Grand Aya-
tollah Yousef Sanei, who has stated directly that the possession or use of nu-
clear weapons is unacceptable, and that Iran did not retaliate with chemical
weapons against Saddam because marjas concurred that weapons of mass
destruction as a whole were unacceptable. Sanei has also issued a fatwa
against suicide bombings. Although Shi‘as may have been responsible for the
devastating suicide attack against the U.S. marine headquarters in Beirut in
1983, Lebanese Hezbollah later stopped using the tactic and since then to
my knowledge Shi‘a Muslims have not perpetrated suicide attacks.
These are just a few illustrations of the important fact that Iranian
Shi‘ism, let alone Shi‘ism outside Iran, is bigger than the current Iranian reli-
gious leadership—something observers from outside the region too often
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274 A History of Iran

fail to register. In recent years dissent from the regime party line has gath-
ered strength among the Iranian ulema, and reform-minded thinkers like
Mohsen Kadivar and Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari have gained a fol-
lowing for their attempts to address current problems within an Islamic
context in an intellectually honest and rigorous way.20 In a sense, Shi‘ism is
doing something the religion has always done—legitimizing an alternative
pole of authority to that power wielded by the dominant regime. At the
same time, the moral authority of the ruling clique has withered just as the
moral authority of the Bolsheviks withered.
Several commentators have remarked upon the caesura in Iranian politics
created by the end of the Iran/Iraq war and the death of Khomeini.21 The
third event that marked this change was the election of Rafsanjani, the for-
mer Majles speaker, as president, in August 1989 (replacing Khamenei, who
became Supreme Leader in place of Khomeini in June). As he became presi-
dent, Rafsanjani announced a new era of reconstruction. Ali Ansari has
called it the mercantile bourgeois republic, the period in which the bazaari
middle class—long the bedrock of support for the political ulema—finally
came into their kingdom.
The war had done huge damage to the Iranian economy and to the living
standards of ordinary Iranians. Per capita income had fallen by at least forty
percent since 1978.22 In the border areas where the fighting had taken place,
some 1.6 million people had been made homeless, and refineries, factories,
government buildings, roads, bridges, ports, and irrigation works had all been
destroyed. The country as a whole had to look after large numbers of badly
injured ex-servicemen, including people suffering from the after-effects of
chemical weapons, many of whom still suffer today. In addition, there were
refugees from Iraq—a large number fled to Iran after the first Gulf War in
1991, when the United States and the UK encouraged a Shi‘a revolt, and
then stood aside while Saddam massacred the rebels—and from Afghani-
stan, where fighting had been raging since the Soviet invasion of 1979. By
the end of the 1990s, Iran was hosting more than two million refugees. Un-
like Iraq, Iran had come out of the war without a serious debt burden, but
the need for reconstruction was great, and Iran’s continuing international
isolation was a handicap.
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Iran Since the Revolution 275

The war had an important unifying effect in the country, and the sacrifices
made by ordinary people enhanced their sense of citizenship and commit-
ment to the Islamic republic. The war was the first major conflict involving
large numbers of ordinary Iranians since the early nineteenth century—per-
haps since Nader Shah. But the commitment and sacrifices were not a blank
check. People expected something back when the war was over. Rafsanjani
promised them precisely this as he was elected. In particular, he promised de-
velopment and an improvement in living standards for the poorest—the
mostazefin—upon whom, as usual, the heaviest burdens had fallen.
But there was disagreement about the policy means to achieve these
goals, and results were mixed. Since the revolution, for the necessity of the
prosecution of the war but also to serve the declared aim of greater social
equality, the regime had followed broadly statist economic policies. Now
Rafsanjani, true to his bazaari origins and sympathies, tried to build the
economy by pursuing greater market freedom. But disagreements within the
regime hampered the effort—in particular, privatization measures went
ahead and then were halted, amid accusations of mismanagement and cor-
ruption. Some progress and some expansion of the economy were achieved,
but less than had been hoped. Industrial and agricultural production in-
creased, as did exports—especially agricultural exports, and, notably, pista-
chio exports, in which Rafsanjani’s own family had a significant stake. But
the economy remained heavily dependent on oil, the oil industry remained
inefficient for lack of international help to secure the most up-to-date tech-
nology, and that help was further blocked by U.S. economic sanctions,
which sharpened through the 1990s as part of the policy of dual contain-
ment applied to both Iran and Iraq. Much investment in the economy went
into a construction boom, which benefited the investors, but less so the
mostazefin, if at all.23
By the midpoint of Rafsanjani’s second term (1993–1997), there was
widespread disappointment with his efforts. Living standards, especially for
the less well off, had not improved in the way the people had been led to
hope. Unemployment was increasing, partly as a result of sluggish economic
performance but also because the population had continued to expand dra-
matically over the previous twenty years. Iran’s rate of population growth
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276 A History of Iran

was one of the highest in the world in this period—the total went from 33.7
million at the time of the 1976 census to 48.2 million in 1986 and to an esti-
mated 68.5 million in 2007—though the rate of increase has now moder-
ated. Tehran grew to a city of some 12 million people. Throughout the
1990s large numbers of new would-be workers were coming onto the job
market each year.
Despite the problems, the first eighteen years of the Islamic republic had
achieved important beneficial results for many ordinary Iranians. A deter-
mined push to improve conditions for the rural population succeeded where
the Pahlavi regime had largely failed, introducing piped water, health ser-
vices, electricity, and schools even in some of the most remote districts. Life
expectancy lifted sharply, along with literacy rates (now around eighty per-
cent—eighty-six percent for men and seventy-three percent for women).
Perhaps the most important improvement, reflected in the literacy rate, was
in education. Primary education was, at last, effectively extended to all. Iran
is a country with a strong cultural appreciation of literacy, education, and in-
tellectual attainment, and families made the most of the new opportunities.
The effect of the revolution on the position of women was typically
mixed. They lost the better treatment at divorce that the last shah had intro-
duced, which meant that fathers in principle got child custody—although in
practice, as Ziba Mir-Hosseini’s film Divorce Iranian Style demonstrated,
women often manage to find ways around this principle in the divorce
courts.24 But women retained the vote. While polygamy and child marriage
were made legal again, they almost never happen, except in some Sunni areas
like Baluchistan. The imposition of the veil, along with encouragement from
the religious hierarchy, allowed tradition-minded fathers to let their daugh-
ters attend schools, which were normally established on a single-sex basis.
Girls took to this new opportunity with such energy and application that
now sixty-six percent of students admitted to Iranian universities are
women.25 Given the pressure on families to make ends meet, many of these
women take up jobs after university and work alongside men, and continue
to do so even after marriage (though many also languish in unemployment).
Some observers, notably Farah Azari, have remarked upon the way that or-
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Iran Since the Revolution 277

thodox, traditional Shi‘ism has worked in the past to repress women and fe-
male sexuality in Iran, linking that to male anxiety in periods of social and
economic change. There are still books to be written on the other distor-
tions this has caused historically.26 The success of women’s education, and
the greatly expanded importance of women in the workplace and in the
economy, is a huge social and cultural change in Iran—one that in time, and
combined with other factors, is likely to have profound consequences for
Iranian society as a whole. Surveys have indicated that this is already emerg-
ing in more liberal attitudes toward education, the family, and work.27 There
are parallel changes in attitude away from religion toward more secular, lib-
eral, and nationalistic positions.28 Some clerics among the ulema are chal-
lenging the religious judgments on the status of women that were pushed
through into law at the time of the revolution. These developments are not
peripheral but are absolutely central to the future of the country.

Reform?
Women were some of the strongest supporters of President Khatami, who
was elected in May 1997 with a reformist program. Without attacking the
velayat-e faqih, Khatami called for proper constitutional government and for
a halt to extra-judicial violence. He said several times that he believed his re-
form program was the last chance for the Islamic republic—that if reform
were blocked, the people would demand secular government and overturn
the theocratic regime altogether. But his reforms were blocked, and the
regime became increasingly unpopular, especially among young people. Lev-
els of attendance at mosques have plummeted. Over the last decade the
hard-line regime has become more and more overtly self-serving, cynically
using its religious trappings, and manipulating elections to keep vested in-
terests in power.
Khatami’s election was an unpleasant surprise for the hard-line leader-
ship (they had supported his opponent Nateq Nuri), and they seemed to
take some time to adjust to the changed conditions of politics that followed.
Khatami won seventy percent of the vote in an election that captured the
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278 A History of Iran

national imagination as none had done for years. This victory energized a
new generation of young Iranians and gave them hope for the future. Unfor-
tunately, Khatami was outmaneuvered by his opponents, and those hopes
were disappointed. Some have suggested that he was a stooge for the hard-
liners all along, but it is more plausible that he was just a bit too nice for pol-
itics—too unwilling, at the crucial moment in the summer of 2000, to risk a
confrontation with the hard-liners that could have turned violent.
One question in Iranian foreign policy that always lurked in the back-
ground through this period was that of a resumption of diplomatic relations
between Iran and the United States. On several occasions President
Khatami made statements that seemed to suggest an openness to renewed
contact with the United States, notably in an interview with Christiane
Amanpour of CNN, broadcast in January 1998.29 But it appeared that a
block on renewed relations with America, like Iran’s hostile attitude toward
Israel, was a shibboleth the hard-line elements in the Iranian regime were
unwilling to discard—a sign of keeping faith with the revolution. Some in-
ternational commentators speculated that after the improvement of
UK/Iran relations in the autumn of 1998, Britain would act as an honest
broker between Iran and the United States, but this did not happen. It was
difficult too for the U.S. government to make a serious effort at rapproche-
ment, though President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Al-
bright made a number of conciliatory statements in 1999 and 2000.
The murders of writers and dissidents in November and December
1998—events that became known afterward as the serial murders—were
widely seen as an attempt by operatives within the MOIS to confront and
discredit President Khatami. The victims included Dariush Foruhar, his
wife Parvaneh, and other veterans of the initial phase of the revolution. One
version of events says that Khatami was brought a tape that recorded a tele-
phone call in which the killers—with Parvaneh audible in the back-
ground—had asked their bosses what they should do about her, because her
husband was already dead. When Khatami successfully faced down that
confrontation and secured the arrest of Saeed Emami and some of the other
perpetrators, following up with a purge of the MOIS, many judged that he
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Iran Since the Revolution 279

had strengthened both his own position and the reform process. But the ar-
rests were followed by the detention of thirteen Jews in Shiraz on espionage
charges, and again it seemed that disgruntled MOIS officials had arrested
innocent people in order to portray the organization as bravely resisting
some kind of Zionist plot. The arrests also had the effect of further embar-
rassing Khatami’s efforts at international rapprochement. MOIS claimed at
the time that a number of Muslims (nine, eight, three, or two according to
different statements) had been arrested in connection with the same case.
But details were hazy, and it seems that this was a screen to disguise the
anti-Semitic aspect of the action. Eventually all the Jews were released, but
some had been convicted in the interim of spying for Israel (for which the
penalty can be death), and some of the releases were only on a provisional
basis. That meant that the men might be rearrested should the MOIS find
that convenient.
The question of the detainees and their uncertain future attracted re-
newed criticism of Iran and Iran’s human rights record internationally. It
also threw into harsh relief the situation of Jews in the Islamic republic.
While there are still more Jews in Iran than anywhere else in the Middle
East apart from Israel, it has been estimated that when Israel was estab-
lished in 1948, there were at least 100,000 Jews living in Iran. By 1979, there
were 80,000, and today estimates vary between 25,000 and 35,000.30 This
decline is mainly explained by the emigration of Iranian Jews to Israel and
the United States especially. Plainly, there were both pull and push factors
involved in that emigration, but the rate of emigration accelerated rapidly af-
ter 1979. After the revolution, in accordance with the Islamic injunction to
protect the People of the Book, Khomeini held meetings with Jewish repre-
sentatives and decreed that Jews should be protected. The constitution gave
the Jewish community a fixed representation of one deputy in the Majles
(the Armenian Christians and Zoroastrians are treated in a similar way, ex-
cept that the Armenians have two deputies). Some of the stipulations in
traditional shari‘a law about the inferior legal status of Jews and other non-
Muslims have been changed to make their treatment more equal, but many
unequal distinctions remain. These include the rule that a convert to Islam
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280 A History of Iran

inherits everything when a relative dies, while other claimants who do not
convert get nothing. Under the Islamic republic the old anti-Semitism of
some has simply dressed itself in anti-Zionist clothes (notwithstanding that
many ordinary Iranians feel genuine indignation at Israel’s treatment of the
Palestinians). Many Jews feel that the political anti-Zionism of the regime
has made anti-Semitism respectable, in the newspapers and in petty acts of
persecution—for example, demands that Jews donate to anti-Zionist
causes. The Jewish community generally survives, as at other times in the
past, by making themselves unobtrusive and avoiding trouble. Given the an-
cient history of the Jews in Iran, and their rich and unique Iranian Jewish
culture, this is a sad situation. In the United States and Israel, many Iranian
Jewish families still uphold Iranian traditions—the celebration of Noruz,
for example—and still speak Persian.
The position of the Baha’is has been worse, and many Baha’is have been
imprisoned and executed since 1979 (one accusation leveled at them is that
they have Zionist connections). Baha’is have been subject to intimidation
and arrest, and to forced conversion. Having banned them from attending
university as Baha’is, agents of the regime subsequently attacked those who
had set up and participated in Baha’i study circles.
Although some in the West were disillusioned when President Khatami
sided with the hard-line leadership in the summer of 1999 and let them
break up student protests, it seemed that many Iranians agreed with him
that evolutionary change was better than runaway violence. There was good
reason to think he was right: after the experience of one revolution, it was
understandable that Khatami and many other Iranians were unwilling to
risk their hopes for change on the outcome of street violence.31 Through all
this period, the vigor of the expanded free press in Iran encouraged the be-
lief that reform would prevail.
With the election of the strongly reformist sixth Majles in May 2000
(reform-oriented candidates secured 190 seats out of 290), many observers
thought the reformers were at last in the driver’s seat. Some people specu-
lated that Iran might now move in the direction of a moderated form of
religious supremacy, with the clerical element in the system guiding occa-
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Iran Since the Revolution 281

sionally from the background, rather than taking a direct role as it had since
1979. But in retrospect, it seems that the attacks on former President Raf-
sanjani in that election campaign were a decisive error by the reformist
press, in which they overreached themselves and drove an embittered Raf-
sanjani, who had previously tried rather ineffectually to arbitrate between
the two camps, over to the hard-line side. Beginning in the summer of 2000,
hard-line resistance to the reformist program stiffened and became more
competent, perhaps reflecting Rafsanjani’s advice. A sustained and targeted
series of arrests and closures brought the flowering of the free press to an
end.32 Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei intervened personally to
prevent the new Majles from overturning the press law that facilitated this
crackdown (passed by the previous Majles in the last months of its term).
And the Majles generally found themselves blocked by hard-line elements in
the Iranian system from making any significant progress with the reform
program. If ever Khatami missed the chance to confront the hard-line lead-
ership over his popular mandate for reform—a confrontation that was
probably unavoidable if the reform project was to succeed—this was surely
the time. But the moment passed, the free press faded, and the hard-line
party regained confidence. The testing of the Shahab III medium-range
missile in July 2000 also marked a new phase of sharpened international
concern over Iranian weapons programs and nuclear ambitions.
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9
From Khatami to
Ahmadinejad, and the
Iranian Predicament

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”

—Winston Churchill (speech at
Harvard University, September 6, 1943)

Since 1979, Iran has followed a lonely path of resistance to the global influ-
ence of Western values—particularly that of the United States. One could
see this as a reflection of the Iranians’ continuing sense of their uniqueness
and cultural significance. The Iranian revolution in 1979 was the harbinger
of Islamic revival more widely, showing that previous assumptions about the
inevitability of development on a Western model in the Middle East and
elsewhere had been misguided. As often before, others followed, for better
or worse, where Iran had led. Some hoped in the late 1990s that the
Khatami reform movement might show the way out of Islamic extremism at
the other end, but although there is good evidence that Iranians are today
more skeptical of religious leadership and more inclined to secularism than

283
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284 A History of Iran

most other nationalities in the Middle East,1 that hope appears, at least for
the moment, to have been premature.
The failure of the West fully to take advantage of the opportunity offered
by a reformist president in Iran already looks like a bad mistake. One such
opportunity came after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States
when members of the Iranian leadership (not just Khatami, but also
Khamenei) condemned the terrorist action in forthright terms, and ordi-
nary Iranians showed their sympathies with candlelit vigils in the streets of
Tehran—more evidence of the marked difference of attitude between Irani-
ans and other Middle Eastern peoples. Another opportunity came after Iran
gave significant help to the coalition forces against the Taliban later in 2001,
helping to persuade the Northern Alliance to accept democratic arrange-
ments for post-Taliban Afghanistan.2 In 2002 Iranians were rewarded with
President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, which lumped Iran with
Iraq and North Korea. Finally, the Bush administration ignored an Iranian
offer in the spring of 2003 (shortly after the fall of Baghdad), via the Swiss,
for bilateral talks toward a Grand Bargain that appeared to promise a possi-
ble resolution of the nuclear issue and de facto Iranian recognition of Israel.
The purpose of all this is not to reinforce the cringing sense of guilt that
bedevils many Western observers who look at the Middle East. It is not All
Our Fault, and no doubt if the Iranians had been in the position of strength
that Britain was between 1815 and 1950, or that the United States has been
in since then, they would have behaved as badly, and quite possibly worse.
The Iranians also missed opportunities for rapprochement in the Khatami
years. But too often we have gotten things wrong, and that has had a cost. It
is important to see events from an Iranian perspective, to see how we got
things wrong, and to see what needs to be done in order to get them right.
The most important thing is this: if we make commitments and assert cer-
tain principles, we must be more careful to mean what we say and to uphold
those principles.
The Iranian reaction after 9/11 shows in high relief the apparent paradox
in Iranian attitudes to the West, in general, and to the United States, in par-
ticular. As we have seen, Iranians have real historical grounds for resentment
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From Khatami to Ahmadinejad, and the Iranian Predicament 285

that are unique to Iran and that go beyond the usual postures of nationalism
and anti-Americanism. But among many ordinary Iranians there is also a
liking and respect for Europeans and Americans that goes well beyond what
one finds elsewhere in the Middle East. To some extent this is again a func-
tion of the Iranians’ sense of their special status among other Middle East-
ern nations. Plainly, different Iranians combine these attitudes in different
ways, but the best way to explain this paradox is perhaps to say that many
Iranians (irrespective of their attitude to their own government, which they
may also partly blame for the situation) feel snubbed, abused, misunder-
stood, and let down by the Westerners they think should have been their
friends. This emerges in different ways—including in the rhetoric of poli-
tics, as is illustrated by a passage from a televised speech by Supreme Leader
Khamenei on June 30, 2007:

Why, you may ask, should we adopt an offensive stance? Are we at war with the
world? No, this is not the meaning. We believe that the world owes us some-
thing. Over the issue of the colonial policies of the colonial world, we are owed
something. As far as our discussions with the rest of the world about the status
of women are concerned, the world is indebted to us. Over the issue of provok-
ing internal conflicts in Iran and arming with various types of weapons, the
world is answerable to us. Over the issue of proliferation of nuclear weapons,
chemical weapons and biological weapons, the world owes us something.3

The troubled course of the relationship between Iran and the West has
entered a new and more confrontational phase under President Ahmadine-
jad. His June 2005 election campaign was successful because, with the orga-
nizational backing of the Pasdaran, he articulated the discontent of the
poor and the urban unemployed, manipulating yet again Shi‘a indignation
at the arrogance of power. His opponent in the final stage of the election
was former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who for many Iranians repre-
sented the worst of the corrupt cronyism of the regime. But many voted for
Ahmadinejad simply because for once they had a chance to vote for some-
one who was not a mullah. Most foreign observers, often unduly influenced
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286 A History of Iran

by their contacts in prosperous, reform-inclined north Tehran, were taken

completely by surprise at the result. Prior to his election Ahmadinejad, who
had visited poorer parts of the country that had not seen a politician for
years, emphasized economic and social issues; his religious enthusiasm and
his urge to cut a figure in international relations has blossomed only since
then. The election was far from fair or free—many reformists openly boy-
cotted it, in protest at the exclusion of their candidates by the Guardian
Council. In the second round Ahmadinejad received at most sixty percent of
the vote in a sixty percent turnout—less than forty percent of the total
number of electors. In the first round of the elections, with a wider field of
candidates, he was the first choice of only six percent of the voters.
In the summer of 2005 Niall Ferguson warned that Ahmadinejad could
be the Stalin of the Iranian revolution. Ahmadinejad may have the instincts
and aspirations of a Stalin, but the political position in Iran is not so open
to his ambitions, and he seems unlikely to prove a figure of the same fierce,
sinister intelligence. For months the Majles blocked—in the end, success-
fully—his appointment of favorites and hangers-on to his cabinet. It
seemed unlikely then, and seems even more unlikely now, that Ahmadine-
jad can deliver on his promises to the poor. His economic management has
been heavily criticized within Iran, and his introduction of gasoline ra-
tioning in the summer of 2007 seems likely to undercut his populism fur-
ther. After the introduction of the gas rationing, a poll appeared to show
that 62.5 percent of the people who voted for Ahmadinejad in 2005 would
not do so again.4 But if the nuclear confrontation with the West, for which
he has been the figurehead, leads to sanctions, it could give him and the
regime as a whole an alibi for their failure yet again to deliver on the econ-
omy and jobs.
Some observers of the situation in Iraq and Iran have warned apocalypti-
cally of the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran controlling a Shi‘a-dominated
Iraq, a resurgent Shi‘a Hezbollah in Lebanon, and a rising (Sunni) Hamas
in the West Bank and Gaza, combined with Iranian-backed Shi‘a move-
ments erupting in Bahrain and along other parts of the southern coast of the
Persian Gulf. This is not a combination that Israel (let alone others) can af-
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From Khatami to Ahmadinejad, and the Iranian Predicament 287

ford to be complacent about, and the threats of President Ahmadinejad,

even if more rhetoric than real, are still significant and influential.
But all is not quite as it may seem. In the wider Middle East, with the pos-
sible exception of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shi‘as show little enthusiasm for
Iranian-style Islamic rule. For Shi‘ism as a global phenomenon, the velayat-e
faqih looks increasingly like a radical step too far, and otherwise the most ex-
treme voices in Islam come from the Sunni side. Under the influence of Al-
Sistani and Moqtada al-Sadr, Iraqi Shi‘as have maintained an independent
line, though more attacks and provocations by Sunni insurgents may push
them further into the arms of the Iranians. Iran has an influence on Shi‘a
Iraq, and the Iranians tend to see themselves as the protectors of the Iraqi
Shi‘as—as they do for Shi‘as elsewhere. But the Shi‘ism of southern Iraq,
centered on the great shrines of Najaf (the tomb of Ali), Karbala, and
Samarra, has an authority of its own, independent of Iranian Shi‘ism, which
is centered on the theological schools of Qom. Iraqi Shi‘as do not necessarily
trust the Iranians. And many ordinary Iranians do not much like seeing
their government spending money and effort on behalf of foreigners—
whether Iraqis, Lebanese, or Palestinians—when plenty of Iranians lack
jobs, housing, and decent living conditions.
The ruling regime in Iran has many faults, but it is more representative
than most in the Middle East outside Israel (though the trend is not encour-
aging—the Majles elections of 2004 and the presidential elections of 2005
were more interfered with and less free than previous elections). Despite re-
pressive measures by the state, Iran is not a totalitarian country like the So-
viet Union during the Cold War. It is a complex polity, with different power
centers and shades of opinion among those in power. There is space for dis-
sent—within certain boundaries. Iran still has the potential for self-generated
change, as has been recognized by observers from Paul Wolfowitz to Reza
Pahlavi, the son of the last shah. Important independent Iranian figures like
Shirin Ebadi and dissidents like Akbar Ganji have urged that Iran be left
alone to develop its own political solutions. One theory of Iranian history, ad-
vanced by Homa Katouzian and others,5 is that Iran lurches from chaos to
arbitrary autocracy and back again. There is certainly some evidence of that
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288 A History of Iran

in the record. Perhaps increased political freedom would merely unleash

chaos, and no doubt there are pragmatists within the current Iranian regime
who make just that argument for keeping things as they are. One could in-
terpret the crisis of the reform movement in 2000, followed by the press
crackdown, as another episode in the Katouzian cycle. There are signs of
disillusionment and nihilism among many young Iranians after the failure of
the Khatami experiment.6 But I don’t believe in that kind of determinism.
There is real social and political change afoot in Iran, in which the natural
dynamic toward greater awareness, greater education, and greater freedom is
prominent. Other Europeans in the seventeenth century used to say that
England was a hopelessly chaotic place, full of incorrigibly violent and fanat-
ical people who clamored to cut off their king’s head. A century later En-
gland was the model to others for freedom under the law and constitutional
government.7
There are grounds for some cautious optimism. The preparedness of Iran
and the United States in the spring of 2007 to speak to each other openly
and directly for the first time since the hostage crisis is in itself a great step
forward that looked impossible—from the perspective of both sides—a year
or two ago. The talks are about Iraq. A priority for those talks must be to in-
duce Iran to end the attacks on U.S. and British servicemen in Iraq by Shi‘a
militia that have caused too many deaths and terrible injuries (the frequency
of the attacks seems, in the winter of 2007/2008, to be diminishing). But at-
tempts to lay a major part of the blame for the current problems in Iraq at
the door of the Iranians have been dishonest. When the U.S. government
presented a dossier in February 2007 detailing allegations that Iran had sup-
plied components for explosive devices to attack coalition armored vehicles,
the number of deaths they connected to such attacks was 187, and the valid-
ity of the allegations was disputed.8 At that time the total number of casual-
ties among U.S. and coalition servicemen in Iraq was more than three
thousand. Overwhelmingly, coalition servicemen have been killed and
wounded not by Shi‘a militias backed by Iran, but by Sunni insurgents
backed by—whom? Presumably by elements within countries like Jordan
and Saudi Arabia.9 But we don’t hear so much about that. Iran has been ac-
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From Khatami to Ahmadinejad, and the Iranian Predicament 289

cused of trying to destabilize the new Iraqi government. But why would Iran
wish to do that when Iraqi Shi‘as sympathetic to Iran are running that gov-
ernment already? Like the capture of the British sailors and marines in the
spring of 2007, Iranian involvement in Iraq is better explained not as aggran-
dizement aimed at any other outcome, but rather as a reminder from the
Iranians to the United States and Britain that Iran has permanent interests
on her borders. The Iranian regime, as pragmatism would suggest, has al-
ways insisted on its desire for stability in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
It does not look like a good time, with Ahmadinejad in power, for the
West to attempt a rapprochement with Iran. But willy-nilly, the United
States and Britain need Iranian help in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the re-
gion in general. This is a simple reflection of the fact that Iran is a perma-
nent and important presence in the Middle East, and that Iran has been the
prime beneficiary of the removal of the Taliban and Saddam, Iran’s former
enemies. The present government of Iran is far from perfect, but there are
other governments in the Middle East that are as bad or worse—on democ-
racy or human rights—whom we have few scruples about describing as
close allies. If we can deal respectfully with Iran as a partner and an equal—
and not merely, as too often in the past, as an instrument to short-term ends
elsewhere—we might be surprised at how far even the current hard-line
regime would go in taking up the partnership. Then we would see the bene-
ficial effects a better relationship could have within Iran. The Iranian leader-
ship is not just Ahmadinejad, and his leverage in the Iranian system is less
than it appears. The wider leadership circle—those who coordinate deci-
sions in the Supreme National Security Council—is substantially the same
as it was in 2003, when it authorized the Grand Bargain offer.
There are many bleak aspects to the current situation in Iran. The arrests
of women and visiting academics in the spring of 2007 were yet another ret-
rograde step. Arrests to enforce the dress code (which relaxed significantly in
the Khatami period) and prevent so-called immorality in public, such as a
couple holding hands or kissing, intensified at the same time.10 Khatami’s
purge of the MOIS has been reversed and many of those suspected of com-
plicity in the serial murders of 1998 have returned. Peaceful demonstrations
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290 A History of Iran

are broken up and demonstrators arrested and held for extended periods. It
is sad beyond words that the president of a country with such a diverse and
profound intellectual heritage—and such an ancient and important Jewish
presence—should seek to make a splash with a conference for an interna-
tional rag bag of wild-eyed Holocaust deniers and an exhibition of offensive
and inane cartoons. But the propensity of the Iranian regime to Holocaust
denial did not begin with Ahmadinejad, just as Iranian support for Hamas
and Hezbollah, and their attacks on Israel, goes back many years. Ah-
madinejad’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map—or according to a more
precise translation, “erased from the page of time”—was foolish and irre-
sponsible.11 His position on the problem of Israel and the Palestinians—
that Israel was created for European Jews as a manifestation of European
guilt after the Nazi Holocaust, and that the Israelis should go back to Eu-
rope—was ignorant and crass. The Jews of Israel came from a wide variety
of countries over a long period, including large numbers in the last two de-
cades from the former Soviet Union. Plainly the shock of the Holocaust was
one factor in the establishment of Israel, but so too was the poor position of
Jews in Islamic countries at that time. In the years immediately after the es-
tablishment of the state of Israel in 1948, roughly equal numbers came from
Islamic countries on the one hand, and from Europe on the other (includ-
ing, for example, around 260,000 from Morocco, 129,290 from Iraq, 29,295
from Egypt, 229,779 from Romania, 156,011 from Poland, and 11,552 from
Germany in the period 1948–195512). Of course, many tens of thousands of
Iranian Jews went to Israel in those years also. In that period Jews in the
Middle East, just as much as the Jews of Europe, were seeking a country in
which they could be masters of their own destiny—in which they could re-
sist persecution with their own means, as opposed to hoping uncertainly for
the friendly intervention of non-Jewish state powers, as had always been the
case in the Diaspora. Anti-Semitism had not been just a European phenom-
enon, and in some degree the present problem of relations between Muslims
in the Middle East and Israelis is merely a transformed and relocated ver-
sion of the old problem of how the majority of Islamic peoples of the Mid-
dle East related to the minority of Jews (and other dhimmis) in their midst.
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From Khatami to Ahmadinejad, and the Iranian Predicament 291

Notwithstanding the real need for a solution to the suffering of the Pales-
tinians, for Ahmadinejad to expect the Israelis to return to their former sta-
tus as second-class citizens and victims in the Middle East is unrealistic
political posturing.

The Nuclear Dispute

Ahmadinejad’s provocative remarks about Israel have sounded the more
threatening because of the continuing dispute over Iran’s nuclear program.
Most Western states have suspected Iran of trying to acquire a nuclear
weapon capability, which if acquired would be a contravention of Iran’s com-
mitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and associ-
ated agreements. The Iranians claim they have no nuclear weapon ambitions
and say, correctly, that the other NPT signatory states are bound to assist
Iran’s civil nuclear program under their NPT commitments. The Interna-
tional Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found no evidence of an Iranian
nuclear weapon program. But after the discovery of undeclared nuclear sites
at Arak and Natanz in 2002, the IAEA has said that the Iranians have re-
peatedly failed to meet safeguards obligations, and that it could not be confi-
dent that there were no further undeclared nuclear activities or materials in
Iran. The IAEA’s chairman, Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, has called for greater
cooperation and openness from the Iranians to dispel legitimate suspicions
about an Iranian nuclear weapon program. Others have pointed out that
Iran was not obliged to declare the sites at Arak and Natanz, because they
were not yet operational. In the autumn of 2005 the IAEA declared that
Iran was not in compliance with the NPT safeguards agreement. Since
then, the UN Security Council has called upon Iran to suspend uranium
enrichment, and has imposed sanctions.
Uranium enrichment is achieved by spinning uranium gas in a centrifuge
to separate out the more fissile uranium 235 isotope from the less fissile ura-
nium 238 isotope. Uranium 235 is the isotope needed for nuclear reactions,
and uranium containing a higher than normal proportion of Uranium 235 is
described as “enriched.” Uranium enriched to between two and three percent
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292 A History of Iran

is satisfactory for a civil nuclear reactor but needs to be further enriched to

ninety percent or more for a nuclear weapon. This is the problem: civil ura-
nium enrichment is a legitimate activity under the NPT. But once the en-
richment process has begun, the difference between enrichment to levels
consistent with civil use and the levels necessary for weapons is difficult to
verify from outside. Iran has been enriching uranium since April 2006, and
estimates for the time needed to gather enough highly enriched uranium for
a bomb have ranged from two to eight years, depending on the number of
centrifuges and the efficiency of their operation.
The Israeli and U.S. governments have made plain that they cannot ac-
cept Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon. But within Iran, Ahmadinejad
and other politicians have presented opposition to their program as West-
ern blocking of Iranian civil nuclear power, and the dispute has produced an
upsurge of nationalist feeling in favor of Iran’s right to nuclear power. This
shades ambiguously into support in some quarters for Iran to be a nuclear
power—that is, a power with nuclear weapons, like Pakistan, India, Israel,
France, Russia, the UK, and the United States. Meanwhile, as the clock ticks
and the centrifuges spin, Israel warns that it will take military action to de-
stroy the Iranian nuclear (weapon) program if it is not halted by other
means. Some of the rhetoric against Iran in the United States can be dis-
missed as ignorance and political scare mongering. Israeli concerns cannot.
It may be that the Iranian leadership is determined to acquire a nuclear
capability. If so, even Israeli or U.S. bombing campaigns could not stop it in-
definitely—the processes could be dispersed and concealed in deep under-
ground bunkers, if they have not been already. And Iran could do enormous
damage to the United States and her allies in retaliation. But the declaration
by Iranian religious leaders against ownership of nuclear weapons should be
given some credence. Possession of a capability to produce a nuclear
weapon, as opposed to an actual weapon, would be almost as desirable for
the Iranian regime as a weapon itself—it would have most of the deterrent
effect of an actual weapon, and the only real utility of nuclear weapons is de-
terrence. That may be the real Iranian aim—but even that may not be a
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From Khatami to Ahmadinejad, and the Iranian Predicament 293

fixed, determined aim. If Iran were able to normalize its relations with the
United States, remove the threat of regime change, and obtain even a limited
version of the sort of security guarantees U.S. allies enjoy, the perceived need
for a nuclear weapon capability would be much reduced, if not removed al-
together. That may be part of the significance of the Grand Bargain offer of
2003. Either way, the United States should at least attempt to resolve the
problem in this way before seriously considering military action. It should
always be a principle to exhaust diplomacy before contemplating an act of
war. That is the minimum that the soldiers and civilians who might die in
the event of war have a right to expect of their governments. U.S./Iranian
diplomacy has barely yet begun. It may be that after the National Intelli-
gence Estimate of November 2007, and the revelation it contained, that the
U.S. intelligence agencies collectively believed that Iran had halted its nu-
clear weapon program in 2003, negotiation toward a normalization of rela-
tions may have become a little easier. At least the danger of conflict appears
for the moment to have receded.

Empire of the Mind?

The deeper, reflective, humane Iran is still there beneath the threatening me-
dia headlines. Iranian cinema is one of the most remarkable phenomena of
the country since the revolution. Banned from the themes of violence and
sex regarded by Hollywood as indispensable, Iran has produced a cinema of
unique poetic artistry and universal appeal that has won many international
prizes. Directors like Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Mohsen Makhmalbaf,
and his daughter Samira Makhmalbaf have become internationally recog-
nized through films like The Apple, 10, Taste of Cherry, The Circle, Blackboards,
and Colour of God. Many of these films develop subjects dealing with the
mistreatment of women, the vulnerability of children, the effects of war, the
distortions of Iranian politics and society, and other themes critical or tend-
ing to be critical of the Islamic regime. Some say that many Iranians, espe-
cially young Iranians, never watch these films, choosing instead to see
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294 A History of Iran

Hollywood-style film romances that never get an outing in the West. But
this cinema nonetheless shows the enduring greatness, the potential, the
confidence, and the creative power of Iranian thought and expression.
Iran and Persian culture have been hugely influential in world history. Re-
peatedly, what Iran has thought today, the rest of the world (or significant
parts of it) has believed tomorrow. At various stages Iran has truly been an
Empire of the Mind, and in a sense it is still—Iranian culture continues to
hold together an ethnically and linguistically diverse nation. Iran is poised
now to take on a bigger role in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the region generally
than it has taken for many years. But is Iran an empire of the future? In
other words, can Iran take the role of importance and influence in the Mid-
dle East and the wider world that is her due?
This has to be considered doubtful. One element of the doubt is whether
the wider world community will allow Iran that role. But another doubt, the
main doubt, is whether today’s Iran, governed by a narrow and self-serving
clique, is capable of that wider role. In the past, at its best, Iran attained a po-
sition of influence by fostering and celebrating her brightest and best
minds—by facing complexity honestly, with tolerance, and by developing
principles to deal with it. Today Iran is ruled by merely cunning minds,
while the brightest and best emigrate or are imprisoned, or stay mute out of
fear. A generation of the best-educated Iranians in Iran’s history have grown
up (more than half of them women) only to be intimidated and gagged.
Iran’s international position has been one of extreme isolation for over
twenty years, and when one of Iran’s sharpest and most humane minds,
Shirin Ebadi, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, the enthusiasm with
which she was feted in the wide world contrasted dismally with the way she
was ignored by the Iranian government on her return. Since 1979 Iran has
challenged the West, and Western conceptions of what civilization should
be. That might have been praiseworthy in itself, had it not been for the suf-
fering and oppression, the dishonesty and disappointment that followed.
Could Iran offer more than that? Iran could, and should.
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Epilogue

Since the early editions of this book appeared in late 2007 and early 2008,
Iran has seldom been out of the news. Concern over Iran’s nuclear program
has been a constant factor, but other Iran-related developments have dis-
placed that question from the news agenda.
Policy toward Iran was an important feature of the U.S. presidential
election campaign that culminated in November 2008 with the election of
President Barack Obama. It was clear throughout that campaign, and even
during the nomination contest between Obama and Hillary Clinton that
preceded it, that there would be a change of approach toward Iran if a
Democratic administration took office. But even the Bush administration,
as if recognizing against its instincts the hard realities of the situation,
seemed to moderate its attitude toward Iran in its last months, airing the
possibility of direct U.S.-Iran talks and even the restoration of diplomatic
relations at some level. In the course of the nomination campaign, there were
signs that an Obama administration might be more disposed to negotiation
with Iran than a Clinton administration would—notably when Hillary
Clinton dropped into a television interview the comment that the United
States “would be able to totally obliterate” Iran in the event of an Iranian
nuclear attack on Israel.1

295
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296 Epilogue

The election of President Obama created a new predicament for the rul-
ing group in Iran. His early declarations of openness to direct talks with the
Iranians, his preparedness to speak of the Islamic Republic as such rather
than in circumlocutory terms that avoided appearing to recognize the nature
of the regime, as previous administrations had done, and his intelligently
crafted Noruz message in March 20092 challenged the stale rhetoric of the
Iranian regime and forced them to contemplate a change in their own poli-
cies of intransigence. But both sides knew that little could be expected to
shift in the U.S.-Iran relationship in advance of the Iranian presidential elec-
tions scheduled for June 2009. Many observers both outside Iran and within
the country hoped that the elections would produce an Iranian leader with a
new, positive outlook to complement Obama’s, permitting some real
progress at long last.
It was not to be. Once again, the Iranian presidential elections produced a
surprise—all the more so because this time the surprise was of a different
order altogether from the surprises of past elections. In 1997 and in 2005,
surprise outsiders had won the elections. This time the surprise was in the
conduct of the elections themselves, which led to weeks of demonstrations
and unrest of an intensity not seen since the revolution of 1978–1979.
In the last week before election day on June 12, many observers thought
they discerned a growing wave of enthusiasm for the leading opposition can-
didate, Mir-Hosein Mousavi. Mousavi had served as defense minister during
the Iran-Iraq war, but like Khatami before him, he appeared to have neither
the track record nor at first the charisma of someone likely to shake the foun-
dations of the state. The perception of a developing movement behind
Mousavi was reinforced by early indications of a high turnout, suggesting
that pro-reform voters who had boycotted the elections in 2005 had turned
out to vote this time. But although the votes, when they were counted, cer-
tainly showed a high turnout—eighty-five percent—they gave Ahmadinejad
a whopping sixty-three percent of the vote: well over the fifty percent thresh-
old needed to win the vote outright (less than fifty percent would have meant
a second round of voting, with a run-off between the two candidates who
had won most votes in the first round).
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Epilogue 297

In assessing the outcome of the election, it is necessary to be clear that no

one has yet produced what would count as conclusive proof that the results
were falsified. But there were a number of suspicious indications. One was
that previous precedents for release of the results were abandoned—nor-
mally results emerged by region, but this time successive announcements
were made on the basis of a larger number of votes counted each time, for
the country as a whole—and each time the proportion of each new tranche
of votes going to each candidate was suspiciously similar. The distribution
of votes for each candidate, when the final results were out, showed again
the same suspicious consistency across rural and urban voting districts,
and in those dominated by religious and ethnic minorities—as if someone
had picked figures for the final result and had then applied that formula to
each part of the country in arbitrary fashion, with the help of a computer
program. Against all previous experience in Iranian elections, there was no
significant sign of a swing toward candidates in their home districts: the
proportional formula held up even there.
The regime’s handling of the results deepened suspicions to the point
at which the election looked increasingly like a coup carried out by the
ruling group to keep Ahmadinejad in office. Several months before the
elections, Supreme Leader Khamenei had made statements supportive of
Ahmadinejad that already marked a departure from previous practice.
After the election results came out, Khamenei spoke forcefully in support
of Ahmadinejad’s reelection within a few hours, acclaiming it as a divine
judgment—previously the Supreme Leader had waited until the
Guardian Council ratified the result, which usually took three days. Even
before the final results were known, in the small hours of the morning,
police and troops were on the streets to forestall demonstrations—an-
other grim novelty. They surrounded the Interior Ministry (from which
the results were being announced) and Mousavi’s campaign headquarters,
severely hampering the opposition movement’s communications and their
ability to respond to events.
Over the following weeks a number of rumors emerged that, taken
together, may go some way to explain how the election turned out as it did.
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298 Epilogue

It seems that the ruling clique became increasingly concerned that the elec-
tions might develop a bandwagon effect comparable to that which resulted
with the election of President Khatami in 1997—an outcome they were de-
termined to avoid. One version says that the government conducted a secret
poll that showed an outright win for Mousavi. Several reports purporting to
come from dissidents in the Interior Ministry alleged that reformist-oriented
staff were purged and swiftly replaced by Ahmadinejad’s supporters, who set
about a plan to falsify the results. There were a number of suggestions that
the cleric most closely associated with Ahmadinejad—Ayatollah Mesbah
Yazdi—had issued a ruling that all means were legitimate to ensure the con-
tinuation of the prevailing form of Islamic government.
There is little doubt that many voters turned out for Ahmadinejad on
June 12. The usual judgment is that his support was strongest in the coun-
tryside and in the more remote parts of Iran. Voters who distrusted both the
regime and the perceived urban sophistication of the opposition candidates
may still have voted for Ahmadinejad because unlike other politicians, he
looked and sounded like them—they understood him and felt they could
trust him in spite of his failure to reverse worsening economic conditions
and standards of living in his first term. Many Iranians supported his strong
stance against the west and in favor of Iran’s right to a civil nuclear program.
In the countryside it was also easier for the regime to coerce voters—
whether by increases in salaries just before the election, or by threats. But
one should not go too far (as some have) in characterizing the elections as a
confrontation between an urbanized, westernized, vocal minority versus a
relatively silent, rural majority. The population of Iran in 2009 was more than
sixty percent urban. It seems unlikely that more voted for Ahmadinejad in
2009 than did in 2005, when his opponent was Rafsanjani. One Western
reporter, who went out of her way to speak to working-class Ahmadinejad
supporters, found some that would be vocal in his support, only to whisper
“Mousavi” to her afterward.3
Whatever the truth of what happened—it may never be fully known—
there was an immediate and strong reaction. Thousands of Iranians turned
out on the streets of Tehran and other cities to protest, wearing scarves or
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Epilogue 299

bandanas in green, the color of the Mousavi campaign. Within a few days,
the number of protestors had grown to hundreds of thousands, with esti-
mates saying a million on Monday, June 15. Their numbers and their diverse
origins belied the thought that this was merely sour grapes from an isolated
group, disappointed that the result had gone against them. European and
U.S. news media reported excitedly that these were the biggest demonstra-
tions in Iran since the revolution. In the evenings, Iranians gathered on
rooftops to shout “Allahu Akbar,” as they had in 1978–1979.
Over the first weekend of demonstrations, Ahmadinejad referred to the
demonstrators as Khas o Khashak, dust and trash or flotsam and jetsam, that
would be swept away. But the demonstrations did not go away. Despite beat-
ings and arrests, and despite efforts by the regime to prevent any reporting
of the protests, they continued, and Iranians found ways to get reporting out
of Iran, including through new Internet channels like Facebook and Twitter.
On the evening of June 20, a young woman called Neda Agha-Soltan got
out of her car, which was obstructed by the protesting crowds on Kargar Av-
enue in central Tehran, to escape the heat. She was accompanied by her
middle-aged music teacher. Soon afterward, she was shot in the chest and
despite the efforts of those around her, including a doctor, to staunch the
flow of blood, she was dead within a few minutes. Bystanders filmed the
event on mobile telephones, and the images went around the world on
YouTube. Neda became a symbol of the protests and of the brutality of the
regime’s conduct (their spokesmen later claimed that she had been shot by
the CIA or other foreigners). Despite the dwindling of the street protests in
later weeks, under pressure from the police and the Basij militia, demonstra-
tors turned out again in large numbers on July 30, the fortieth day after her
death, to protest against the shooting.4 There were demonstrations again on
September 18, when the regime attempted to hold its usual event (Qods
day—Jerusalem day) to show support for the Palestinians against Israel.
Opposition demonstrators, making use of the fact that the color used to
symbolize the Palestinian cause, like that of the Mousavi campaign, was
green, appeared again en masse, took over the event and shouted down the
official slogans.
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300 Epilogue

Some Western commentators said or wrote that the outcome of the elec-
tions was immaterial because there was little to choose between the policy
intentions of the two main protagonists, Mousavi and Ahmadinejad. That
missed the point. Mousavi and his reformist supporters were not looking to
overturn the Islamic republic, but what had happened was no less important
for the fact that they were not following a Western-inspired agenda. By rig-
ging the elections (as was widely believed to have happened), the regime had
gone much further than ever before in subverting the representative element
in the Iranian constitution and had thereby precipitated a crisis over the very
nature of the Islamic republic. Important figures like former presidents Raf-
sanjani and Khatami were openly critical of what had happened. The oppo-
sition candidates Mousavi and Karrubi (the latter a more longstanding and
more radical figure in reformist politics than Mousavi) refused to be si-
lenced. The Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was forced to take a more parti-
san position than ever before, abandoning the notion that his office put him
above day-to-day politics. The demonstrators rewarded him with the chant
“marg bar diktatur” (“death to the dictator”). There is a widespread perception
that his position has been weakened.
Ever since the revolution, the Islamic principle and the constitutional, re-
publican, democratic principle had worked uneasily together, and the demo-
cratic element had been eroded. But now those who had cherished the
representative strand, who had believed that had been one of the achieve-
ments of the revolution, and that its survival gave some hope for renewal and
peaceful change, were faced with the bald fact that it had been snatched
away. They were now being ruled under the threat of naked force, under the
aegis of a ruling group whose claim to Islamic legitimacy had worn very
thin. Several leading clerics were critical of the conduct of the elections, and
others stayed pointedly silent. The crisis was not just a confrontation be-
tween the regime and a section of the populace; it was also a crisis within the
regime itself. At the time of writing (November 2009), it is still not resolved.
In the meantime, the regime blamed Western governments for instigating
the demonstrations, presenting the Obama administration with a sharpened
dilemma: should America pursue its policy of détente with a regime that
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Epilogue 301

had just, in the judgment of many of its own citizens, stolen an election in
such a bare-faced manner? But the logic of engagement with Iran had not
depended upon the virtue or otherwise of the Iranian regime, and Obama
continued his cautious attempts to engage with the Iranians. This was de-
spite revelations in the autumn that showed that the Iranian government
had been constructing a further uranium enrichment facility near Qom and
was conducting new missile tests.
The elections and their aftermath further strengthened the position of the
Revolutionary Guard corps—Sepah-e Pasdaran. Their close relationship with
President Ahmadinejad was well-known, and there were many reports (as in
2005) of their engagement in the election campaign in his interest, but the
regime’s dependence on them to face down opposition and keep the ruling
group in power was only intensified by the outcome of June 12. The role of the
Revolutionary Guard in every aspect of Iranian life, and especially in the econ-
omy, had been increasing and strengthening for many years. It was empha-
sized further in October 2009 when a company linked to the Pasdaran paid
the equivalent of $8 billion (U.S.) for a controlling share in the state telecom-
munications monopoly. The country was looking more and more like a mili-
tary dictatorship—a tighter and more effective version of what the revolution
had brought down in 1979. After the June 12 elections, Ayatollah Montazeri
commented,“What we have is not Islamic republic but military republic”5 (the
increasing prominence of clerics like Montazeri in the opposition to the
regime is another significant phenomenon in the aftermath of June 12—some
of the issues involved were discussed on pages 273–274 in chapter 8).
Despite this gloom, the elections also showed the continuing commit-
ment of young Iranians (despite previous indications of nihilism and de-
spair) to the principles of justice and constitutional government, in an
Iranian Islamic context, that their predecessors had been struggling for
since 1906. There is no reason to think that they are going to give up on
those principles. The even longer history of the profound Iranian distaste
for unjust and oppressive rulers, some of which has been traced in this
book, gives hope that they will ultimately prevail.
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Notes

Preface—The Remarkable Resilience

of the Idea of Iran
1. Gobineau, the earliest theorist of Aryan racial theories, served as a diplomat in the
French Embassy in Tehran in the 1850s.

Chapter 1—Origins: Zoroaster, the Achaemenids,

and the Greeks
1. Accessed from the University of Pennsylvania’s Web site, [Link]/
new/research/Exp_Rese_Disc/NearEast/[Link].
2. A. T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire: Achaemenid Period (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1948), 22–23.
3. The nature of the early Zoroastrian religion is subject to great difficulties of
interpretation, on the surface of which I can barely make a scratch. I have relied heavily on
Alessandro Bausani, Religion in Iran: From Zoroaster to Bahu’u’llah (New York: Bibliotheca
Persica, 2000); see also Mary Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism, Volume One: The Early
Period (Leiden: Brill, 1975), and Shahrokh Razmjou, “Religion and Burial Customs,” in
Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 150–180.
4. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 10–11; see also Mary Boyce, Zoroastrianism: A Shadowy but
Powerful Presence in the Judaeo-Christian World (London: Dr. William’s Trust, 1987), 9.
5. Though Bausani, Religion in Iran, doubted this explanation as too simplistic, 29–30, it
is an attractive intellectual model with an obvious read-across to the way early Christianity
assimilated some previous religious forms, while literally demonizing others as superstition
or witchcraft.

303
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304 Notes to Chapters 1 and 2

6. Though in the earliest times Ahriman’s direct opponent was Spenta Mainyu—
Bounteous Spirit—rather than Ahura Mazda, who was represented as being above the
conflict.
7. Boyce, Zoroastrianism, 8.
8. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 53.
9. The late Mary Boyce believed that Zoroastrianism became better known to the Jews
after the end of the Achaemenid Empire, through these diaspora communities (Boyce,
Zoroastrianism, 11).
10. See Richard C. Foltz, Spirituality in the Land of the Noble: How Iran Shaped the World’s
Religions (Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2004), 45–53, and Edwin Yamauchi, Persia and the Bible
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1990), 463–464, for a counter to the Boyce thesis.
11. Daniel D. Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia (London: Histories and
Mysteries of Man, 1989), 115–120.
12. James Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament with
Supplement, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 316.
13. Patricia Crone, “Zoroastrian Communism,” in Comparative Studies in Society and
History 36 ( July 1994): 460.
14. Maria Brosius, Women in Ancient Persia, 559–331 BC (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1998), 198–200 and passim.
15. Olmstead, 66–68, quoting later Greek sources.
16. Alessandro Bausani, The Persians (London: Book Club Associates, 1975), 20.
17. Josef Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 33 and 82. An
alternative reading of the evidence would be that Darius murdered the real Bardiya (and
possibly his brother Cambyses before him) to gain the throne. He then had to crush a
series of loyalist rebellions and concoct a cover story.
18. Ibid., 67–69.
19. Alexandra Villing, “Persia and Greece,” in Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient
Persia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 236–249.
20. See Villing, 230–231.
21. Olmstead, 519–520.
22. Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism, 78–79.

Chapter 2—The Iranian Revival: Parthians

and Sassanids
1. Wiesehöfer, 134.
2. Ibid., 145.
3. Habib Levy, Comprehensive History of the Jews of Iran, H. Ebrami, ed. (Costa Mesa, CA:
Mazda Publishers, 1999), 113–115.
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Notes to Chapter 2 305

4. I have taken these lines from an eighteenth-century translation of Plutarch, “by

Dacier and others” published in Edinburgh in 1763. In the modern Penguin edition of The
Bacchae (Harmondsworth: 1973), Phillip Vellacott translated the same lines: “I am bringing
home from the mountains / A vine-branch freshly cut / For the gods have blessed our hunting.”
5. “Arsacid Dynasty,” in Encyclopedia Iranica (New York: Routledge, 1982– ).
6. Ibid.
7. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 12; Wiesehöfer, 149.
8. “Arsacid Dynasty,” in Encyclopedia Iranica.
9. Levy, 113.
10. “Mithraism,” in Encyclopedia Iranica.
11. Touraj Daryaee, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (London: I. B. Tauris,
2007); Wiesehöfer, 160.
12. Homa Katouzian, Iranian History and Politics: The Dialectic of State and Society
(London: Routledge, 2007).
13. Daryaee, Sasanian Persia.
14. Wiesehöfer, 161; “Shapur I,” in Encyclopedia Iranica.
15. Anthologized in Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, eds., The School Bag (London:
Faber and Faber, 1997), 183–186.
16. Daryaee, Sasanian Persia.
17. See Touraj Daryaee, Sahrestaniha-i Eransahr: A Middle Persian Text on Late Antique
Geography, Epic, and History (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2002).
18. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 107.
19. Ibid., 83–96.
20. Daryaee, Sasanian Persia.
21. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 89.
22. Ibid., 89, 118, and 120; Daryaee, Sasanian Persia.
23. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 87.
24. For Pelagius the best book, an important book, is B. R. Rees, Pelagius: Life and Letters
(Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 1998). My account of Augustine would be
disputed by some, who still uphold his theological positions (reasserted in the sixteenth
century and later by Calvinists), but the facts of his time as a Manichaean are not
disputed. Much recent Christian theology has turned away from many Augustinian
positions, favoring more Pelagian attitudes. An interesting aspect of the dispute is that
Pelagius maintained that man could perfect himself and attain salvation by his own efforts;
Augustine insisted that salvation could only come by the aid of God’s grace. There is a
similarity between Pelagius’s ideas on this point and the thinking of some Islamic thinkers,
notably Ibn Arabi (see Chapter 3).
25. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 86.
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306 Notes to Chapters 2 and 3

26. Also Sprach Zarathustra: “wenn ich frohlockend sass, wo alte Götter begraben liegen,
weltsegnend, weltliebend neben den Denkmalen alter Weltverleumder”—“if ever I sat rejoicing where
old gods lay buried, world-blessing, world-loving, beside the monuments of old world-slanderers.”
27. “Shapur I,” in Encyclopedia Iranica.
28. Daryaee, Sasanian Persia.
29. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 11–13. See page 15 for Bausani’s explanation of the later
redaction of the Zoroastrian Pahlavi texts in the ninth century.
30. “The Sassanids,” in Encyclopedia Iranica; Ammianus Marcellinus, vol. 2, 457–503,
Loeb Classics.
31. Ibid.; Daryaee, Sasanian Persia.
32. Ibid.
33. Crone, 448. She considered the religious movement to be a life-affirming reaction to
gnosticism rather than an outgrowth of Manichaeism (461–462), and followed an
alternative chronology of events that set the death of Mazdak after Khosraw’s accession to
the throne. Many aspects of the Mazdak episode are disputed.
34. Mohammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, The Sasanids, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids, and Yemen,
vol. 5 of History of al-Tabari, edited and translated by C. E. Bosworth (Albany: State
University of New York Press), 135 and note. The story also appears in Western accounts,
but some of them give the woman as Kavad’s wife.
35. Wiesehöfer, 190.
36. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 101.
37. Ibid., 100; Daryaee, Sasanian Persia.
38. Al-Tabari, 149.
39. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London:
Printed by A. Strahan for T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1802), vol. 7, 149–151 (the passage
draws on the Byzantine historian Agathias).
40. “The Sassanids,” in Encyclopedia Iranica.
41. Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 10–11.
42. “The Sassanids,” in Encyclopedia Iranica.

Chapter 3—Islam and Invasions: The Arabs,

Turks, and Mongols
1. Modern colloquial Persian is in many ways simplified from the written form of
classical Persian, and the Persian of young Iranians now is changing further, borrowing
many words from English, via films, television, and the Internet.
2. The interpretation of the Prophet’s dealings with the Jews of Medina is a
controversial subject. See Bertold Spuler, The Age of the Caliphs: A History of the Muslim
World (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995), 11–12; Norman A. Stillman, The
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Notes to Chapter 3 307

Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book (Philadelphia: Jewish Publications Society,
1979), 11–16.
3. See Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam (New York: Routledge, 1985),19–20
and passim.
4. See for example Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 30.
5. Richard N. Frye, The Golden Age of Persia: The Arabs in the East (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1975), 64–65.
6. Aptin Khanbaghi, The Fire, the Star and the Cross: Minority Religions in Medieval and
Early Modern Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 25.
7. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 118.
8. Ibid., 111–121.
9. Ibid., 111; for the changes after the conquest see The Cambridge History of Iran: From
the Arab Invasion to the Saljuq, vol. 4 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 40–48.
10. Ibid., 63–64.
11. Hugh Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs (London: Phoenix, 2005), 134–136.
12. Ehsan Yarshater, “The Persian Presence in the Islamic World,” in The Persian
Presence in the Islamic World, Richard Hovannasian and Georges Sabagh, eds. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 70–71.
13. Frye, The Golden Age of Persia, 122–123; Bausani, Religion in Iran, 143.
14. Bausani, The Persians, 84–85.
15. Mehdi Nakosteen, History of the Islamic Origins of Western Education, AD 800–1350
(Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1964), 20–27.
16. Quoted in Frye, The Golden Age of Persia, 150.
17. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 121–130; see also Khanbaghi, 20–27.
18. Quoted in Crone, 450.
19. Persian transliterated from Reza Saberi, A Thousand Years of Persian Rubaiyat: An
Anthology of Quatrains from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century Along with the Original Persian
(Bethesda, MD: Ibex Publishers, 2000), 20; for the translation I am grateful to Hashem
Ahmadzadeh and Lenny Lewisohn for their help. The selection of poetry that follows here
is a personal one and includes a disproportionate number of rubaiyat—largely because the
quatrain form is shorter than the other main verse forms and enabled me to incorporate
more poetry from a variety of poets in a short space, and to include the original Persian.
20. Jerome Clinton, “A Comparison of Nizami’s Layli and Majnun and Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet,” in The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love and Rhetoric, K. Talattof
and J. Clinton, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), xvii.
21. Ibid., 72–73.
22. Idries Shah, The Sufis (London: Octagon Press, 1964), xiv.
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308 Notes to Chapter 3

23. A. J. Arberry, Classical Persian Literature (London: George Allen/Ruskin House, 1958),
67.
24. Mehdi Aminrazavi, The Wine of Wisdom: The Life, Poetry and Philosophy of Omar
Khayyam (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007), 25–27.
25. Ibid., 199–200.
26. Saberi, 75; translation by Axworthy, Ahmadzadeh, and Lewisohn. There are examples
of quatrains where Fitzgerald took greater liberties with the originals.
27. Aminrazavi, 131–133; Ehsan Yarshater, ed., Persian Literature (New York: Bibliotheca
Persica Press, 1988), 148–150.
28. Saberi, 78; translation by Axworthy, Ahmadzadeh, and Lewisohn.
29. A. J. Arberry, The Ruba‘iyat of Omar Khayyam: Edited from a Newly Discovered Manuscript
Dated 658 (1259–60) in the Possession of A. Chester Beatty Esq. (London: Emery Walker Ltd.,
1949), 14; Ahmad Saidi, ed. and trans., Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992), 36; translation by Axworthy, Ahmadzadeh, and Lewisohn.
30. For Sufism generally, see especially Leonard Lewisohn, The Heritage of Sufism, Volume I:
Classical Persian Sufism from Its Origins to Rumi (700–1300) (Oxford: Oneworld, 1999), and
Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1975).
31. Lewisohn, The Heritage of Sufism, 11–43; Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 2
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 203, 209, 213, 217–222, 293, 304.
32. The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 5: The Saljuq and Mongol Periods (London:
Cambridge University Press, 1968), 299.
33. Arberry, Classical Persian Literature, 90–91.
34. R. Gelpke, Nizami: The Story of Layla and Majnun (Colchester: Bruno Cassirer, 1966), 168.
35. Clinton, 25.
36. Leonard Lewisohn and C. Shackle, eds., Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of
Spiritual Flight (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 255; and L. Lewisohn, “Attar, Farid al-Din,” in
Lindsay Jones, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion, 15-Volume Set (New York: MacMillan Reference
Books, 2005), 601—cf. Nietzsche: Was aus Liebe getan wird, geschieht immer jenseits von Gut
und Böse—That which is done out of love, always takes place beyond Good and Evil.
37. Farid al-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds, Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis,
eds. and trans. (London: Penguin Classics, 1984), 57–75.
38. David Morgan, Medieval Persia 1040–1797: History of the Near East (London:
Longman Publishing Group, 1988), 88–96 and passim.
39. The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 5, 313–314; based on John Andrew Boyle, ed.
and trans., The History of the World-Conqueror ( Juvayni) (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1958), 159–162.
40. Ibid., 337.
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Notes to Chapter 3 309

41. Levy, 245.

42. Jalal al-Din Rumi, The Masnavi, Book One, Jawid Mojaddedi, ed. and trans. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4–5.
43. Saberi, 257; translation by Axworthy and Ahmadzadeh.
44. William C. Chittick and Peter Lamborn Wilson, eds. and trans., Fakhruddin Iraqi:
Divine Flashes (London: Paulist Press, 1982), 34.
45. Ibid., 36.
46. Baqer Moin, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), 47. These are
deep waters; the idea of the Perfect Man refers back to Sohravardi, Neoplatonism, and
possibly to the personifications (daena, fravashi) and angels in Zoroastrianism; see also
Henry Corbin, En Islam Iranien: Aspects Spirituels et Philosophiques, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard,
1971), 297–325.
47. Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi‘ite Iran
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 139; the similarity to the earlier extracts
describing the daena is obvious.
48. Chittick and Wilson, 60.
49. G. M. Wickens, trans., The Bustan of Sa’di (Leiden: 1974), 150.
50. Edward Granville Browne, A Literary History of Persia: Volume II, From Firdawsi to Sa’di
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 530.
51. Saberi, 274; translation by Axworthy and Ahmadzadeh.
52. Ibid., 277; translation by Axworthy and Ahmadzadeh.
53. Arberry, Classical Persian Literature, 331. There is more than an echo of this poem in
Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach.
54. Arberry, 43; I am grateful to Lenny Lewisohn for his translation. Compare with
Thomas Hardy’s poem “Moments of Vision”:
That mirror
Which makes of men a transparency
Who holds that mirror
And bids us such a breast-bare spectacle see
Of you and me?
55. And not just Iranians—Western commentators have agonized over whether such
poems, addressed to a Beloved in the third person singular—which in Persian is gender
neutral—are homoerotic or conventionally heterosexual. The answer, given the absence of
clear gender markers, such as one finds in other poems, is surely that the ambiguity is
deliberate. One might more profitably reflect how appropriate the neutral third person is
to the higher meaning of the Beloved, i.e., to God.
56. P. Natil Khanlari, ed., Divan-e Hafez (Tehran: 1980), ghazal 197; also quoted in John
W. Limbert, Iran: At War with History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), 144.
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310 Notes to Chapters 3 and 4

57. Saberi, 384; Saberi’s translation.

58. The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 5, 546–547.
59. Jürgen Paul, “L’invasion Mongole comme revelateur de la société Iranienne,” in L’Iran
face à la domination Mongole (Tehran: 1997), 46–47 and passim.
60. Cf. Mostafa Vaziri, Iran as Imagined Nation: The Construction of National Identity (New
York: Marlowe and Company, 1994), passim.
61. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1967), 353–355; E. Gellner, “Tribalism and the State in the Middle East,” in
Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 1991), passim.

Chapter 4—Shi‘ism and the Safavids

1. The following draws largely on Moojan Momen, An Introduction to Shi‘i Islam: The
History and Doctrines of Twelver Shi‘ism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987),
28–33 and passim.
2. See for example James A. Bill and John Alden Williams, Roman Catholics and Shi‘i
Muslims: Prayer, Passion, and Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2002), 1–7.
3. Kathryn Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern
Iran (Cambridge: Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 2002), xxxviii.
4. Ibid., xxxix.
5. Encyclopedia Iranica “Esmail” (Savory); see also Andrew J. Newman, Safavid Iran:
Rebirth of a Persian Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 9–12.
6. “Esmail,” in Encyclopedia Iranica (Savory).
7. Newman, 24–25 , passim.
8. The extent of Shi‘ism in Iran before 1500 and the changes thereafter have been
thoroughly explored by Rasul Ja‘farian, Din va Siyasat dar Dawrah-ye Safavi (Qom: 1991).
9. Foltz, 134.
10. V. Minorsky, ed. and trans., Tadhkirat al-Muluk: A Manual of Safavid Administration
(London: Gibb Memorial Trust, 1980), 33–35.
11. See Willem Floor, The Economy of Safavid Persia (Wiesbaden, Germany: 2000), and
Rudolph Matthee, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History 1500–1900
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
12. C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780–1830
(London: Longman, 1989), 30; J. Foran, “The Long Fall of the Safavid Dynasty: Moving
Beyond the Standard Views,” in The International Journal of Middle East Studies, no. 24
(1992): 281–304 (passim); Mansur Sefatgol, “Safavid Administration of Avqaf:
Structure, Changes and Functions, 1077–1135/1666–1722,” in Society and Culture in the
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Notes to Chapter 4 311

Early Modern Middle East: Studies on Iran in the Safavid Period (Leiden: Brill Academic
Publishers, 2003), 408.
13. See Willem Floor, Safavid Government Institutions (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda
Publishers, 2001) and Minorsky.
14. “Molla Sadra Shirazi,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica (Sajjad Rizvi). “Molla” and “Mullah”
are the same word, but I refer to Molla Sadra in this way in an attempt to distance him
from modern connotations that could be misleading.
15. Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 179.
16. Yarshater, Persian Literature, 249–288, and, notably, the quotation from Bausani,
275.
17. Levy, 293–295; see also Eliz Sanasarian, Religious Minorities in Iran (Cambridge/New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 45.
18. To get a sense of this, albeit in a description from a later period, the relationship
between the Jewish family and their village mullah in Dorit Rabinyan’s Persian Brides
(Edinburgh: George Braziller Publishers, 1998) is vivid and memorable.
19. Mottahedeh, 203. The thinker Ali Shariati (1933–1977) also attacked the Shi‘ism
of the Safavid period (Black Shiism) but arguably was addressing deficiencies of religious
practice in his own time rather than making a historical point. His priority was to
encourage a resurgence of true Shi‘ism (Red Shi‘ism)—a revolutionary Shi‘ism of social
justice—see Chapter 7.
20. See Rudolph Matthee, “Unwalled Cities and Restless Nomads: Firearms and
Artillery in Safavid Iran,” in Safavid Persia: The History and Politics of an Islamic Society
(London: I. B. Tauris, 1996), and Michael Axworthy, “The Army of Nader Shah,” in
Iranian Studies (December 2007).
21. Matthee, The Pursuit of Pleasure, 61.
22. Ibid., 50–56.
23. Roger Savory, Iran Under the Safavids (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 232.
24. Matthee, The Pursuit of Pleasure, 58–60.
25. Ibid., 91–92, 92n. The evidence comes not just from Western observers at court, but
also from Persian sources; the Shaykh ol-Eslam of Qom had the temerity to criticize the
shah’s drinking and was lucky to escape execution for it.
26. Newman, Safavid Iran, 99; “Part of this struggle for the hearts and minds of the
‘popular’ classes.”
27. See V. Moreen, “Risala-yi Sawa’iq al-Yahud [The treatise Lightning Bolts Against
the Jews] by Muhammad Baqir b. Muhammad Taqi al-Majlisi (d. 1699),” in Die Welt des
Islams 32 (1992), passim.
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312 Notes to Chapters 4 and 5

28. J. Calmard, “Popular Literature Under the Safavids,” in Society and Culture in the Early
Modern Middle East: Studies on Iran in the Safavid Period (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers,
2003), 331.

Chapter 5—The Fall of the Safavids, Nader Shah,

the Eighteenth-Century Interregnum, and the
Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty
1. This version is taken from Sir John Malcolm, History of Persia: Containing an Account of
the Religion, Government, Usages, and Character of the Inhabitants of That Kingdom (London:
Murray, 1829), 399–400; but a number of Persian and other sources give the same story—
cf. Mohammad Kazem Marvi, 18, and Fr. Judasz Tadeusz Krusinski, The History of the Late
Revolutions of Persia (London: 1740; New York: Arno Press, reprint 1973), 62–64.
2. Matthee, The Pursuit of Pleasure, 92–94; Babayan, 485; Lewisohn, The Heritage of
Sufism, Volume I, 132–133.
3. Birgitt Hoffmann, ed. and trans., Persische Geschichte 1694–1835 erlebt, erinnert und
erfunden—das Rustam at-Tawarikh in deutscher Bearbeitung (Bamberg, Germany: Aku, 1986),
203–204, 290; Krusinski, 121–122; Michael Axworthy, The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah, from
Tribal Warrior to Conquering Tyrant (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 31–33.
4. Bayly, 30; Foran.
5. Krusinski, 196–198.
6. Axworthy, The Sword of Persia, 142.
7. N. D. Miklukho-Maklai, “Zapiski S Avramova ob Irane kak istoricheskii Istochnik,”
in Uchenye Zapiski Leningradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Seriia vostokovedcheskikh nauk,
Part 3 (Leningrad.: 1952), 97.
8. Basile Vatatzes (ed. N. Iorga), Persica: Histoire de Chah-Nadir (Bucharest, Romania:
1939), 131–133.
9. Levy, 360–362; Axworthy, The Sword of Persia, 169.
10. The full significance of Nader’s religious policy is covered admirably in Ernest
Tucker’s Nadir Shah’s Quest for Legitimacy in Post-Safavid Iran (Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 2006).
11. See Axworthy, The Sword of Persia, 249–250; as well as Axworthy, “The Army of
Nader Shah.” The size of the army is corroborated from a number of sources, and is
plausible given earlier trends.
12. Bayly, 23 (Ottoman and Moghul figures); Floor, The Economy of Safavid Persia, 2;
Charles Issawi, The Economic History of Iran, 1800–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1971), 20; Willem Floor, “Dutch Trade in Afsharid Persia” Studia Iranica, Tome 34,
fascicule 1, 2005 .
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Notes to Chapter 5 313

13. Axworthy, The Sword of Persia, 280–281.

14. Mirza Mohammad Mahdi Astarabadi, Jahangusha-ye Naderi, translated into French
by Sir William Jones as the Histoire de Nader Chah (London: 1770) (original Persian text
edited by Abdollah Anvar, Tehran, 1377), 187.
15. The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, 63–65.
16. Floor, The Economy of Safavid Persia, 3.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 2–3; Issawi, 20.
19. Floor, “Dutch Trade in Afsharid Persia,” 59.
20. Notably by Ann K. S. Lambton, “The Tribal Resurgence and the Decline of the
Bureaucracy in the Eighteenth Century,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Islamic History
(Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977). For this
paragraph see also The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, 506–541 (Richard Tapper); Richard
Tapper, Frontier Nomads of Iran: A Political and Social History of the Shahsevan (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–33; and Gellner.
21. Hasan-e Fasa’i, History of Persia Under Qajar Rule (New York: Columbia University
Press 1972), 4.
22. Ibid., 52–54.
23. Malcolm, 125.
24. The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, 125.
25. See Hamid Algar, “Shi‘ism and Iran in the Eighteenth Century,” in Studies in
Eighteenth-Century Islamic History (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1977).
26. Mottahedeh, 233; a similar process took place in the later Roman Empire with the
title of senator and other honorifics.
27. Momen, 238–244; Nikki R. Keddie (Ghaffary), Qajar Iran and the Rise of Reza Khan
1796–1925 (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1999), 94–96.
28. For example, Hasan-e Fasa’i, 101–102.
29. The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, 142–143.
30. Malcolm, 217.
31. Denis Wright, The English Amongst the Persians: Imperial Lives in Nineteenth-Century
Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 1977), 4–5.
32. The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, 331–333; Hasan-e Fasa’i, 111.
33. Ibid., 334; Keddie, Qajar Iran and the Rise of Reza Khan 1796–1925, 22.
34. Ibid., 335–338.
35. Nikki R. Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2006), 42–43.
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314 Notes to Chapters 5and 6

36. Laurence Kelly, Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran: Alexander Griboyedov and Imperial
Russia’s Mission to the Shah of Persia (London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2006), 190–194.
37. Nikki R. Keddie, “The Iranian Power Structure and Social Change 1800–1969: An
Overview,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 2 ( January 1971): 3–4; The Cambridge
History of Iran, vol. 7, 174–181.
38. Keddie, Qajar Iran and the Rise of Reza Khan 1796–1925, 17; The Cambridge History of
Iran, vol. 7, 174.

Chapter 6—The Crisis of the Qajar Monarchy, the

Revolution of 1905–1911, and the Accession of the
Pahlavi Dynasty
1. Abbas Amanat, Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Shah and the Iranian Monarchy,
1831–1896 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 252.
2. Levy, 427.
3. Ibid., 430.
4. Haideh Sahim, “Jews of Iran in the Qajar Period: Persecution and Perseverence,” in
Religion and Society in Qajar Iran (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 293–310.
5. Sanasarian, 45–46.
6. Hasan-e Fasa’i, 256–260.
7. Amanat, 44, 66.
8. For a case study of the Qashqai tribe bringing out these points, see Lois Beck,
“Women Among Qashqai Nomadic Pastoralists in Iran,” in Women in the Muslim World
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).
9. Keddie, Qajar Iran and the Rise of Reza Khan 1796–1925, 26–28; Amanat, 113–117.
10. The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, 182–183.
11. Amanat, 428–429; The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, 180.
12. Ibid., 180.
13. Ibid., 401–404 (Greaves).
14. Quoted in Ervand Abrahamian, “The Causes of the Constitutional Revolution in
Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 10 (August 1979): 400.
15. Nikki R. Keddie, “Sayyid Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani,” in Pioneers of Islamic Revival
(London: Zed Books, 2005), 24 (I drew on Keddie also for the last part of the previous
paragraph).
16. Levy, 397.
17. The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, 199–200.
18. Abrahamian, “The Causes of the Constitutional Revolution in Iran,” 404.
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Notes to Chapter 6 and 7 315

19. Ibid., 408–409.

20. Levy, 490–491.
21. Mottahedeh, 221–222; Vanessa Martin, Islam and Modernism: The Iranian Revolution
of 1906 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989), 193–195.
22. Ibid., 223; Moin, 22.
23. Levy, 498–507.
24. The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, 206–207; Said Amir Arjomand, The Turban for
the Crown: Islamic Revolution in Iran (London: Oxford University Press, 1988), 46.
25. Morgan Schuster, The Strangling of Persia (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), 219.
26. Ali Ansari, A History of Modern Iran Since 1921: The Pahlavis and After (London:
Longman, 2003), 22.
27. Accessed at [Link]
28. For the contrary view see Homa Katouzian, “Riza Shah’s Legitimacy and Social
Base,” in The Making of Modern Iran: State and Society Under Riza Shah, 1921–1941 (London:
RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 16–18.
29. Ansari, A History of Modern Iran Since 1921, 21–22.
30. Homa Katouzian, State and Society in Iran: The Eclipse of the Qajars and the Emergence of
the Pahlavis (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 165; Arjomand, 60; Keddie, Qajar Iran and the Rise
of Reza Khan 1796–1925, 74.
31. Wright, 181; Katouzian, State and Society in Iran, 233; also Keddie, Qajar Iran and the
Rise of Reza Khan 1796–1925, 79; Michael Zirinsky, “Imperial Power and Dictatorship:
Britain and the Rise of Reza Shah, 1921–1926,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 24
(November 1992): passim.
32. Arjomand, 62–63.

Chapter 7—The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979

1. Vita Sackville-West, Passenger to Teheran (London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 1991; 1st
ed., 1926), 100–101; Keddie, Qajar Iran and the Rise of Reza Khan 1796–1925, 79.
2. Stephanie Cronin, “Paradoxes of Military Modernisation,” in The Making of Modern
Iran: State and Society Under Riza Shah, 1921–1941 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 44
and passim.
3. Issawi, 376.
4. Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1982), 143.
5. Issawi, 375–379.
6. Rudolph Matthee, “Education in the Reza Shah Period,” in The Making of Modern
Iran (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 140 and passim.
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316 Notes to Chapter 7

7. Kamran Talattof, The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 53–62. The story that all Hedayat’s
works had been banned by Ahmadinejad was carried in the Guardian in an article by
Robert Tait on November 17, 2006, but when I visited Iran in November 2007, I was told
that only one of his works had been banned.
8. Yarshater, Persian Literature, 336–380.
9. Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, 143; Katouzian, “Riza Shah’s Legitimacy
and Social Base,” 29–30.
10. Ansari, A History of Modern Iran Since 1921, 56–59.
11. Ibid., 68.
12. Katouzian, “Riza Shah’s Legitimacy and Social Base,” 26–32.
13. Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, 163 (the shooting) and 158–161; Ansari,
A History of Modern Iran Since 1921, 64.
14. Ibid., 164.
15. Katouzian, “Riza Shah’s Legitimacy and Social Base,” 32–33.
16. Levy, 544–546.
17. Accessed at [Link] and [Link]/
site/apps/s/[Link]?c=fwLYKnN8LzH&b=253162&ct=285846.
18. Ansari, A History of Modern Iran Since 1921, 110.
19. Ibid., 78–85.
20. Homa Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Legend of an Iranian Writer (London:
RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 13–14; Katouzian rather dryly suggests that the reorientation
would have shifted as easily in the other direction if Axis powers had occupied Iran.
21. Mottahedeh, 98–105; Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, 125–126.
22. Ibid., 164.
23. Moin, 105.
24. Keddie, Modern Iran, 130; Daryiush Bayandor’s researches toward a new book on the
coup argue plausibly that the role of the secret services was rather less significant than previously
thought and that of the clergy and their bazaari supporters was rather more significant.
25. Mottahedeh, 287–323; George Morrison, ed., History of Persian Literature from the
Beginnings of the Islamic Period to the Present Day (Leiden, UK: Brill Academic Publishers,
1981), 201–202 (Kadkani); for Simin Daneshvar’s revelations, see Talattof, 160.
26. Ansari, A History of Modern Iran Since 1921, 133.
27. Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, 420.
28. Issawi, 375–382.
29. Quoted in Ali Ansari, Iran, Islam and Democracy: The Politics of Managing Change
(London: Chatham House, 2000), 38–39.
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Notes to Chapters 7 and 8 317

30. Keddie, Modern Iran, 145; Robert Graham, Iran: The Illusion of Power (London:
Croom Helm, 1978), 69.
31. Moin, 107–108.
32. Ibid., 123.
33. Ibid., 1–8.
34. The best account of such an education is Mottahedeh’s brilliant Mantle of the Prophet.
35. Moin, 42–44.
36. Ibid., 64.
37. Keddie, Modern Iran, 147.
38. Ibid., 152.
39. Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, 535–536.
40. Keddie, Modern Iran, 158.
41. Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, 430–431.
42. James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tregedy of American-Iranian Relations (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 379–382.
43. Farah Azari, “Sexuality and Women’s Oppression in Iran,” in Women of Iran: The
Conflict with Fundamentalist Islam (London: Ithaca Press, 1983), 130–132 and passim, drew
attention to the sexual aspect of the revolution in an insightful chapter, and Mottahedeh,
273, makes a similar point.
44. Mottahedeh, 270–272.
45. Quoted in Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, 419.
46. Ansari, A History of Modern Iran Since 1921, 173.
47. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion, 183–184.
48. Mottahedeh, 328.
49. For a vivid picture of the lives of the Jews of Shiraz in this period, see Laurence D.
Loeb, Outcaste: Jewish Life in Southern Iran (New York: Routledge, 1977).
50. Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, 500–504.
51. Moin, 152–156.
52. Momen, 256–260.
53. Keddie, “Sayyid Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani”, 236
54. Ibid., 208–245; Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, 464–473.
55. Moin, 186.
56. This judgement is based on contributions to the Gulf 2000 Internet forum in the
spring of 2007; particularly on a contribution from Ali Sajjadi, who investigated the case
for a Radio Farda report.
57. Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, 510–513.
58. Ibid., 519.
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318 Notes to Chapter 8

Chapter 8—Iran Since the Revolution: Islamic Revival,

War, and Confrontation
1. Or alternatively, hich ehsasi nadaram—“I have no feelings.”
2. See Chapter 3.
3. With the partial exception, in the context of ghuluww rhetoric, of Shah Esma‘il I (see
Chapter 4).
4. I am grateful to Baqer Moin for this quotation, and his thoughts on this subject, and
the insights in his book Khomeini.
5. Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, 526–529.
6. Moin, 207–208.
7. Roy 1994, 173, claims that none of the most senior ayatollahs (the grand ayatollahs)
supported the velayat-e faqih in 1981—except Montazeri, Khomeini’s pupil.
8. Moin, 214.
9. Momen, 294.
10. Ansari, A History of Modern Iran Since 1921, 233.
11. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion, 1–2.
12. Moin, 282–283; Chris Rundle, From Colwyn Bay to Kabul: An Unexpected Journey
(Stanhope: 2004), 146–150.
13. Quoted in Moin, 275–276.
14. Momen, 298–299.
15. Ansari, A History of Modern Iran Since 1921, 244–245.
16. For further exposition of Soroush’s ideas on this point, see Ansari, Iran, Islam and
Democracy, 75.
17. See Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat, 5–6, and Mottahedeh, 383–384.
18. See the interview published in the Mideast Mirror, January 20, 2000, 15, among other
statements.
19. Moin, 279.
20. David Menashri, Post-Revolutionary Politics in Iran: Religion, Society and Power (London:
Routledge, 2001), 35–38.
21. See Anoush Ehteshami, After Khomeini: The Iranian Second Republic (London:
Routledge, 1995), passim; and Ansari, Iran, Islam and Democracy, 52–53.
22. Keddie, Modern Iran, 264.
23. Ibid., 264–266.
24. See also Ziba Mir-Hosseini, “Women, Marriage and the Law in Iran,” in Women in
the Middle East (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1992).
25. 2003 figures—Keddie, Modern Iran, 286.
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Notes to Chapters 8 and 9 319

26. Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and
Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), gives
thought-provoking analysis on the theme of gender in Iranian history.
27. Azadeh Kian-Thiébaut, “From Motherhood to Equal Rights Advocates: The
Weakening of the Patriarchal Order,” Iranian Studies 38 (March 2005): passim.
28. Brought out most clearly in the comparative surveys carried out by Mansour
Moaddel, which also back up Kian-Thiébaut—for example, 49 percent of Iranians
surveyed believed love was more important than parental approval when marrying (41
percent thought the contrary), where in Iraq the split was 71 percent for parental approval
and 26 percent for love. In Saudi Arabia, the tallies were 50 percent for parental approval
and 48 percent for love. Surveys are accessible at [Link]/research/tmp/
moaddel_values_survey.html.
29. The interview is discussed in detail in Ansari, Iran, Islam and Democracy, 133–137.
30. Sanasarian, Religious Minorities in Iran, 47, 47n; 48, 48n. Others have suggested that
the number of Jews in 1948 may have been as high as 140,000 to 150,000.
31. Shirin Ebadi said something very much to this effect—that one revolution is
enough—in a speech she gave at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in May 2006.
32. For discussion of the crackdown on the free press in the summer of 2000, see
Ansari, Iran, Islam and Democracy, 211–217.

Chapter 9—From Khatami to Ahmadinejad,

and the Iranian Predicament
1. For example, 27 percent of Iranians surveyed by Mansour Moaddel took part in
religious services once a week or more, compared with 33 percent in Iraq, 42 percent in
Egypt, 44 percent in Jordan, and 45 percent in the United States. Fifty-five percent of
Iranians thought Western cultural invasion was a very serious problem, compared with 64
percent of Egyptians, 68 percent of Iraqis, 70 percent of Saudis, and 85 percent of
Jordanians. Asked whether they were primarily Muslim or country nationalists, 61 percent
of Iranians said Muslim and 34 percent said nationalist. In Iraq it was 63 percent Muslim
and 23 percent nationalist; in Jordan, 72 percent Muslim and 15 percent nationalist; in
Saudi Arabia, 75 percent Muslim and 17 percent nationalist; and in Egypt, 79 percent
Muslim and 10 percent nationalist. In Iran 60 percent thought men made better political
leaders than women, compared with 72 percent in Saudi Arabia, 84 percent in Egypt, 86
percent in Jordan, 87 percent in Iraq, and 22 percent in the United States. However, other
findings suggested that, perhaps because they have had more experience with it, Iranians
were less enthusiastic about democracy as the best form of government than others in the
region. Accessed at [Link]/research/tmp/moaddel_values_survey.html.
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320 Notes to Chapter 9

2. For details of Iranian support against the Taliban, see the report from James Dobbins
(leader of the U.S. delegation to the talks in Bonn that set up the coalition), Washington
Post, July 22, 2007.
3. Translated transcript from [Link].
4. Poll by [Link]; reported to Gulf 2000 (a Web discussion forum) by Meir
Javedanfar.
5. Katouzian, Iranian History and Politics; see also Mansour Moaddel, Islamic Modernism,
Nationalism and Fundamentalism: Episode and Discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2004).
6. For these, and for a brilliant snapshot of the general attitudes of at least some young
Iranians, see Nasrin Alavi, We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs (London: Portobello Books,
2005); also R. Varzi, Warring Souls: Youth, Media and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran
(Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
7. One of those historical facts that modern Britons, left bereft of their own history by
their education system, often forget to remember.
8. One hundred seventy in the United States and seventeen in Britain. Figures taken
from BBC, [Link] and the Daily
Telegraph, [Link]/news/[Link]?xml=/news/2006/06/25/[Link]
&sSheet=/news/2006/06/25/[Link].
9. On July 15, 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported, on the strength of comments by
(anonymous) senior U.S. military officers, and others, that although the finger had been
pointed at Iran and Syria, the largest number (45 percent) of foreign suicide bombers and
insurgents in Iraq were from Saudi Arabia (plus 15 percent from Syria and Lebanon, and
10 percent from North Africa—figures for Iran were not given, presumably because they
were off the bottom end of the scale). Suicide attacks have systematically killed larger
numbers of civilians and soldiers in Iraq than other kinds of attacks, and they have been
predominantly, if not entirely, carried out by Sunni insurgents. The same source claimed
that 50 percent of all Saudi fighters in Iraq came there as suicide bombers. The article
commented: “The situation has left the U.S. military in the awkward position of battling
an enemy whose top source of foreign fighters is a key ally that at best has not been able to
prevent its citizens from undertaking bloody attacks in Iraq, and at worst shares complicity
in sending extremists to commit attacks against U.S. forces, Iraqi civilians and the Shiite-
led government in Baghdad.”
10. In April 2007 the Iranian Supreme Court overturned murder verdicts against a
group of Basijis convicted of killing people they regarded as immoral in the southeastern
city of Kerman (in 2002). The victims included a couple that were betrothed, who had
been abducted while on their way to view a house they had been hoping to live in together
after their marriage. The Supreme Court accepted the men’s defense that they believed
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Notes to Chapter 9 and Epilogue 321

they had been justified (on the basis of guidance from Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi), after
giving warnings, in killing people they regarded as immoral. It was thought that there
could have been as many as eighteen such killings in Kerman, and similar murders in
Mashhad and Tehran as well ([Link]
11. The formula had been used before by Khomeini and others, and had been translated
by representatives of the Iranian regime as “wiped off the map.” Some of the dispute that has
arisen over what exactly Ahmadinejad meant by it has been rather bogus. When the slogan
appeared draped over missiles in military parades the meaning was pretty clear. It was partly
to address Ahmadinejad’s remarks, but also because it has often been passed over, that I have
paid some moderate attention to the history of Iran’s Jews in this book.
12. Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History. (London: Black Swan, 1999), 639.

Epilogue
1. [Link]/watch?v=4u1nmGmtD18, accessed September 18, 2009.
2. [Link]/Nowruz/, accessed September 22, 2009.
3. Huria Choudhari, “Beating the Reporting Ban in Iran,” [BBC] World Agenda,
September 2009, 11.
4. [Link]/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran-
protests31–2009jul31,0,[Link], accessed September 10, 2009.
5. Borzou Daraghi, “Ayatollah Calls Government a Military Regime,” Los Angeles Times,
September 14, 2009.
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Page locator in bold indicates map Adel Shah, 163, 165–166, 169
Adhurpat, 55
Abbas Mirza, 178, 180, 181, 184 Adhvenak, 9
Abbas the Great, 134–138, 141, 142 Adultery, stoning for, 264
Abbas II, 141, 142, 159 Afghan revolt against Safavids, 148–151
Abbasid dynasty, 77–85, 104 Al-Afghani, Jamal al-Din, 197–198
court rich and learned, 80–82 Afghanistan
as cultural reconquest of Arabs by founded by Ahmad Khan Abdali, 165–166
Persians, 78 need for Iranian help in, 289
looked back on as a golden age, 80 Afshars, 136, 151, 161
and power of governors/local dynasties, Agha Mohammad Khan (later Shah),
80, 84 169–172, 176. See also Qajar Persia
weakened by tax collecting measures, 119 Agha-Soltan, Neda, 299
Abd al-Wahhab, 175 Agricultural settlements, earliest, 2, 3
Abrahamian, Ervand, 229 Ahmad Khan Abdali (Ahmad Shah
Abu Bakr, 72 Durrani), 165–166, 216, 217, 219
Abu Muslim, 77, 128, 133 Ahmadinejad, Mahmud, 285–286, 292,
Abu’l Abbas, 77 296–301
Achaemenes, 5, 12 and denial of Holocaust, 290
Achaemenid Empire, 11, 12–16, 22, 251 leverage of in Iran less than it appears, 289
absorbed rather than destroyed culture of Ahriman, 7–8, 42, 44
rivals, 14–15, 21 Ahura Mazda, 7–8, 19, 42, 44
accession of Darius, 17–20 Aisha (wife of Mohammad), 71
Alexander’s defeat of, 28, 29 Ajam, 79
and conquest of Egypt, 17 Akhbaris, 172–173
and the Greeks, 23–26 Akhtar (newspaper), 198
and Persian wars, 23, 25, 26 Al-e Ahmad, Jalal, 238–239, 245
refounding of Empire by Darius, 20–23 Albright, Madeleine, 278
system of government under, 21–23 Alchemy of Happiness, The (al-Ghazali), 95
writing looked upon negatively, 22 Alcohol and Safavids, 141–142, 143, 152. See
See also Cyrus also Wine
Acropolis, Athenian, 25, 29 Alexander of Macedonia, 16, 28–30

333
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334 Index

Ali (fourth caliph), 76–77, 125, 126, 133 Augustine of Hippo, 51–53
American school in Tehran, 248–249 Augustus Caesar, 30
Amin od-Dowleh, 199, 200 Aurelian, Emperor, 54
Amir Kabir, 191–192, 205 Averroes, 82
Ammanpour, Christine, 278 Avesta, 5, 9, 34, 40, 55, 57, 58
Amnesty International, 250, 252 Avicenna (Ibn Sina), 81–82, 95, 138, 270
Amuzegar, Jasmshid, 253 “Axis of Evil” speech, 284
Anahita, 54 Azari, Farah, 276–277
Andragoas, 32 Azerbaijan, 205, 216, 232–233, 234, 267
Angels, 9
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), Babi movement and Baha’i religion, 187–189,
231–232, 239 204
Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919, 215–216 and Mohammad Reza Shah, 251–252
Anglo-Persian Oil Company, 212, 227, 235 persecution of under Islamic Republic,
Anti-Semitism, 290 280
Antony, Mark, 38–39 and Qorrat al-Ain, 188, 189
Aq-Qoyunlu, 120–121, 130–131, 132 Babylon and Babylonians, 2, 10, 14, 25, 33
Arabic language, 81–82, 83 Bacchae, The (Euripides), 37
Arabs Baghdad, 78, 80, 90, 104
conquest of Sassanids, 72–74 Bahar, Mohammad Taqi, 139, 225–226
early conquests of, 72, 73, 75–76 Baha’uallah, 189
Aramaic language, 22, 34 Bahrain, 286
Arberry, A.J., 93, 113 Bahram Chubin, 63, 84
Arcadius, Roman Emperor, 56 Bahram V (Bahram Gur), 57–58
Architecture Bakhtiar, Shahpur, 252, 253, 261–262
influence of Persians on Abbasids, 78–79 Bakhtiari tribe, 208, 209
and Isfahan and Safavid, 136, 138, 148 El Baradei, Dr. Mohamed, 291
Parthian and ivan audience hall, 34 Bardiya, 17, 18
and Soltaniyeh, 104 Battle of Marathon, 23
Ardashir, 43–46, 47, 54–55 Bausani, Alessandro, 51, 53
Aristotelian philosophy and logic, 81–2 Bazaar and bazaari merchants, 48, 205, 227,
Armenia, 5, 54 247, 254, 274
Arsacids, 32, 43. See also Parthians Bazargan, Mehdi, 253, 257, 262, 263, 265
Arshak (Arsaces), 32 Behbehani, Aqa Mohammad Baqer, 192
Artabanus (Ardavan) IV, 43, 44 Behbehani, Ayatollah Abdollah, 200, 201,
Artaxerxes (Artakhshathra), 25 202, 203, 204, 208
Artaxerxes II & III, 26 Beheshti, Ayatollah, 266, 272
Asabiyya, 118–119, 131 Beyt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), 81
Ashura commemorations, 125, 173–174, 175, Bidel, 115
243, 268 Bill, James A., 248
Assembly of Experts, 264 Bisitun, 17, 18–19, 20, 22, 86
Assyrians, 2, 4 Black Friday (September 8, 1978), 257
Astyages, 12 Bogomils, 52–53
Atatürk, Kemal, 222, 226, 227 Bonyad-e Mostazefin (Foundation for the
Athens, 24, 25 Oppressed), 263, 265
Attar, Farid al-Din, 97–100 Borujerdi, Ayatollah, 240, 242, 245
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British Carter, President, 256, 258, 266

and blockade of oil exports in 1951, Cathars, 52, 53
235–236 Caucasus, 171, 177, 228
buying Chieftain tanks from, 247 Russian/Persian war in 1804–1828,
changing alliances of prior to WWI, 211 178–179, 180, 181–182
cynical policy of in nineteenth century, Central Intelligence Agency of United States,
195–196 237
and division of Persia in three parts in Chemical weapons, 268, 273, 274
1907, 207–208 China, 33
expatriates in Iran in 1970s, 248 Chionite Huns, 56
failure of policy, and Reza Khan, 218, 219 Christians and Christianity, 50, 55, 57, 125
and Gulf War in 1991, 274 and Manichaeism and Augustine, 51–53
imperialism and Nader Shah, 164 and Mithraism, 41
and improvement of relations in 1998, and Mohammad, 70
278 tolerance and Islam, 74
liaisons with ulema in 1902/3, 200 Churchill, Winston, 283
and mutual protection agreement of Cinema, Iranian, 293–294
1801, 178, 179 Clinton, Bill, 278
and Naser od-Din’s reign, 193 Clinton, Hillary, 295
and occupation in WWII, 227–233 Communist political movements, 229. See also
opposition of al-Afghani towards, 197 Tudeh
and replacing Mossadeq, 236 Conscription, military, 223
restoration of relations in 1954, 240 Constantine, Emperor, 55
rivals with Russia in Persia, 187 Constitution. See Mashruteh
sailors captured by Iran in 2007, 289 Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911,
and successor to Fath Ali Shah, 185–186 202–211, 212
and Treaty of Friendship and Alliance, centralizing effect of, 213
180 Curzon missing impact of, 215
and WWI, 213–214, 215 ideals of resurface again and again,
See also Anglo-Iranian Oil Company; 212–213
Anglo-Persian Oil Company reinstated after Shah’s coup and foreign
British Petroleum, 239 interventions, 208
Buf-e Kur (The Blind Owl), 225 Reza Khan as nemesis and child of, 220
Bulls, 7, 42 Western influence upon, 205, 206, 210
Burial practices, 16 and WWI, 213
Bush, George W., 284, 295 Constitutionalists, 206, 225
Bustan, The Orchard (Sa’di), 111 Continuity from pre-Islamic to Islamic era,
Buyids dynasty, 84, 88 67–68
Byzantium, 63, 64 Corbulo, Gnaeus Domitius, 40
Cossack Brigade, 195, 207, 208, 213, 217, 218,
Caesar, Julius, 36, 38 222
Calendar, 7, 90, 251 Council of Guardians, 264, 286
Cambyses (Kambojiya), 17, 19, 23 Crassus, Marcus Licinius, 36–38
Caracalla, 43 Croesus of Lydia, King, 1, 12
Carlyle, Thomas, 164 Crone, Patricia, 15
Carrhae, battle of, 36–38 Ctesiphon, 33, 44, 72
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Culture Delhi, massacre by Nader Shah, 158

and conquering of Mongols, 104, 105 Demonstrations
and dehqans after Islamic conquest, 60 after arrest of Khomeini in 1963, 242–243
influence of Persian on Abbasids, 78–79, after 2009 election, 296, 297, 298–301
83 against government and land reform, 242
influence outside Persia in Safavid period, and Black Friday, 257
138–139 and economic/religious elements in 1905,
influential in world history, 294 201–202
and Iran as empire of mind, 120, 294 and Golhak in 1906, 202–203
of Parthians, 34 broken up, 289–290
pervasive nature of Persian at time of by students in 1999, 280
Nader Shah, 159 and Writers’ Association in 1977, 253
and resilience of Persian scholar- Dietrich of Nieheim, 259
bureaucrats, 120 Divan (Hafez), 115
and Shu’ubiyya movement, 79 Divine Flashes (Iraqi), 109
spread by Sufis in eleventh/twelfth Divorce Iranian Style (film), 276
centuries on, 95 Dualism
and suppression of writers under Reza and Manichaeism, 49–50, 52
Shah, 225 and Zoroastrianism, 7
under Sassanids, 48–49, 62–63 Dunsterville, Lionel, 214
See also Architecture; Literature; Poetry
Curzon, Lord, 215–216, 217 East India Company (EIC), 135, 177–178
Customs policies under Mozaffar od-Din, Eastern Orthodox Church, 53
200 Ebadi, Shirin, 287, 294
Cyaxares, 4 Ebtehaj, Abol-Hassan, 240
Cyrus (Kurosh) and Achaemenid Empire, Economy
12–16, 20, 21, 23, 26, 251. See also Ahmadinejad’s failure to deliver on, 286
Achaemenid Empire and conquests of Nader Shah, 157, 160,
Cyrus cylinder, 13–14, 15 162, 163
difficulties under Mozaffar od-Din,
Daena, 8–9, 75 200–201
Daghestan, 159–160 growth from 1963 to later 1970s,
Dahae tribe, 32 246–247
Damascus, 76 and growth in 1950s and 1960s, 240–241
Daneshvar, Simin, 239 and industry under Reza Khan, 224
Daqiqi Tusi, 86 inflation/out of control in 1970s,
Dar al-Funun polytechnic school, 191, 196 247–248
Daryaee, Touraj, 58 and late Safavid, 148
D’Arcy, William Knox, oil concession, 200, in mid-1800s and foreigners, 194
212 and Rafsanjani’s market freedom, 275
Darius (Daryavaush), 17–20, 21, 23 revitalization under Abbasids, 80
Darius III, 26, 28 and sanctions by U.S., 275
Darwinism, 116 and Schuster and Russian desire to keep
Darya-ye Nur jewel, 158, 171 Iran poor, 209
Dawkins, Richard, 116 when Reza Shah came to power in 1926,
Dehqans, 47–48, 60, 87 222
Deioces, 4 in WWI and its aftermath, 214
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Education, 199, 224, 242, 247 Genghis Khan, 100, 118

under Islamic Republic, 276–277 Georgia, 178
Egypt, 17, 23, 30, 54 Gerard of Cremona, 82
Election, Iranian, Presidential of 2009, Germany, 213–214, 228
296–298, 300–301 Al-Ghazali, 95
Elam and Elamites, 2, 21 Ghaznavids, 84, 86–87, 88, 89, 90, 104
Emam Reza shrine, 212, 227 Ghuluww (extreme), 130, 131, 141
Emami, Saeed, 278 Gibbon, Edward, 51, 62
Emams, Shia, 127, 128 Gnostics, 49, 53, 94
Esma’il, 131–134, 141–142 Golestan, Garden of Roses (Sa’di), 110, 111
Esma’il III, 166, 168 Golhak protest of 1906, 202–203
Ettela’at newspaper, 265 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 270
Eumenes of Cardia, 29 Gordian, Emperor, 46
Ezra, 25 Gotarzes, 33
Governmental system
Family Protection Law, 252 and Abbas the Great, 135, 137–138
Famines, 194, 214 and Abbasids, 78, 80, 84
Al-Farabi, 81 changes made by Sassanids, 47–48, 59–60
Farazdaq, 261 Mohammad Reza Shah’s failure to
Farrokhzad, Forugh, 226 establish representative, 252
Fascist political movements, 229 more representative than most Middle
Fath Ali Shah, 176–177, 182, 184, 185 Eastern countries, 287
Fatima (daughter of Mohammad), 71, 76–77, and Nader Shah, 161
124, 133 in Qajar state, 183–184
Feda’i, 250, 267 and religion controlled by state in 1990s,
Ferdowsi, Abolqasem, 37, 60–61, 86, 105, 117 271–272
Ferguson, Niall, 286 and resiliency of Persian scholar-
Fiqh, 253 bureaucrats, 120
Fisher, H.A.L., 123 of Seljuk Turks according to Persianate
Fitzgerald, Edward, 91 Abbasid model, 90
Forms only shadow of real world, 108, 109 and Siyasat-Nameh or The Book of
Foruhar, Dariush and Parvaneh, 252, 253, Government, 90
278 and velayat-e faqih established by
Four Journeys (Molla Sadra), 244 Khomeini, 253–254, 263–264
France, 178, 179, 180, 231 Grand Bargain, 284, 289, 293
Fravashi, 9, 34 Great Game, The, 187
Free will, 92 Greeks, 23–24, 32, 48, 81
Freedom Movement, 253, 257, 265, 267 Griboyedov, Alexander, 182, 184
Frye, Richard N., 125 Guardian Council, 264, 286, 297
Fusus al-Kikam, Seals of Wisdom (Ibn Arabi), Gulf War in 1991, 274
108, 244 Gunpowder, 135, 141

Ganji, Akbar, 287 Hadiqat al-haqiqa, The Garden of Truth

Gardane, Count (Claude Matthieu), 179, (Sana’i), 95–96
180 Hadith, 82, 83, 172
Garden of Truth, The (Sana’i), 95 Hadrian, 42
Gaumata, 17 Ha’eri, Shaykh Abdolkarim, 244
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Hafez (Shams al-Din Mohammad Shirazi), Iran and Iranians

87, 112–115, 116, 118 first inscriptions referring to, 45
Hajji Firoz Tepe, 2 formal use of name in 1935, 226
Hajji Mirza Aqasi, 187 idea of, about culture/language not
Al-Hallaj, 94 race/territory, 3
Hamas, 286, 290 identity of, 45, 117
Harun al-Rashid, 84 map of modern, 260
Hebrew script, 10 Median state to become empire of, 5
Hecht, Anthony, 46–47 special sense of status among Middle
Hedayat, Sadeq, 225, 255 Eastern nations, 285
Hephtalite Huns, 58, 59, 63 Iran/Contra affair, 269, 273
Heraclius, Emperor, 64–65 Iran/Iraq war, 267–269, 274, 275
Herat, 120, 192 Iranian settlers/migrations, 1, 2–3, 4, 6
Herodotus, 1, 4, 9, 15, 18, 19, 27, 251 Iraq
Hezbollah, 263, 265, 266, 272, 286, 290 and Iran/Iraq war, 267–269, 274, 275
Hezekiah, 13 shrine cities of southern, 132, 268
Hidden Emam, 188, 204, 253, 261 Al-Iraqi, Fakhroddin, 107–110
Hijra, 70 Iraq War (Second Gulf War), 288–289
Hokumat-e Eslami: Velayat-e Faqih (Khomeini), Ironside, General, 216–218, 219
253 Isfahan, 118, 135, 136, 150, 152, 153, 167,
Holocaust, 230, 290 169, 249
Hormuz, straits of, 135 Islam, 69–71
Hormuzd, 55, 56 and al-Afghani, 198
Hormuzd IV, 63, 66 conversion of Iranians to, 75
Hosein (son of Ali, grandson of Mohammad), and corrupt authority vs. pious austerity,
77, 123–124, 126–127, 173–175 126
House of Justice (adalatkhaneh), 202 and earliest relations with Jews, 70
Hoveyda, Amir Abbas, 253, 263 and Manichaeism, 51
Hulagu, 104 and Mu’tazilis vs. traditionalist Sunni
Human rights issues, 250, 252, 279 ulema, 82–83
Hunayn ibn Ishaq, 81 and strict rules under Maljesi, 147
Islamic Republic of Iran
Ibn Arabi, 108–109, 138, 244, 260, 270 establishment of, 263
Ibn Khaldun, 72, 83, 118–120 and reconstruction, 274–276
Ibsen, Henrik, 111–112 and reform platform of Katami, 277–281
Ijtihad, 172 and repression of immorality in public,
Imperial Bank of Persia, 194–195 289
India and sovereignty of its borders, 289
conquests in by Nader Shah, 157–158 still space for dissent and change, 287
invasion of and establishment of Delhi and women, 276–277
Sultanate, 104–105 Islamic Republic Party (IRP), 264, 266
and Iran’s importance to Britain, 212 Ismaili or “Sevener” branch of
Moghul Empire, 139, 157–158 Shi‘ism/Assassins, 103–104, 128
and Timur, 118 Israel
Indo-European family of peoples, 1 and Ahmadinejad, 290–291
Infant mortality rate, 247 early conquest of and deportations to
International Energy Agency (IAEA), 291 Iran, 9
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Index 339

emigration to, 279 Kasravi, Ahmad, 233–234, 238

Iran’s hostile relationship towards, 278, Katouzian, Homa, 45, 287
280, 284 Kavad I, 58–61
and nuclear-armed Iran, 286–287, 292, 295 Kavad II, 65
See also Jews and Judaism Kayhan newspaper, 265
Kermani, Mirza Reza, 198
Ja’far al-Sadiq, 128 Khadija (wife of Mohammad), 71
Jalal al-Din, 103 Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali, 269, 273, 284, 297,
Jami, 115 300
Jangali movement, 212, 213, 214, 218 Khanaqas, Sufi, 94
Jerusalem, 14–15, 25, 65 Kharijites, 76, 126
Jesuits, 128 Khatami, Mohammad, 277–281, 284, 296,
Jesus of Nazareth, 5, 50, 52, 110 298, 300
Jews and Judaism, 9–10 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 243–244, 245
attacks and persecution of, 103, 140, arrest in 1963, 242
186–187, 208 article attacking in 1978, 256
attitudes towards in late nineteenth attacks upon US government in 1963–4,
century, 198–199 242, 243, 245
and constitution of 1906 and Majles, 204 and Bazargan as prime minster, 262
emigration to Israel and US, 279 becomes leading opponent to shah in
in 1930s, 229 1963–4, 245
Mazdaen influence on, 9–10 and constitution, 245, 264
and Mohammad, 69, 70 criticism of closed-minded mullahs, 271
and Mohammad Reza Shah, 251–252 death of in 1989, 269–270
and orphaned children helped to and denunciation of Persepolis event,
Palestine, 230 251
and Parthians, 34, 40 exile of in 1964, 243, 245
and sacking of Christian Jerusalem in and fatwa vs. The Satanic Verses, 270, 273
614, 65 and government by ulema, 253–254
saving of by Sardari in France, 231 and Ibn Arabi and Perfect Man, 108, 244,
and Shapur, 50 260–261
tolerance towards, 14–15, 57, 74, 157 and letter to Gorbachev, 270–271
under Islamic Republic, 279–280 and protection of Jews, 279
See also Israel return to Iran in February 1979, 258,
Jizya tax, 74 259–260
Jordan, 288 and Revolutionary Council, 262
Julian, Roman Emperor, 55–56 and silencing of opposing Shi’a leaders,
Justice, 21, 57 264
Justinian, Byzantine Emperor, 62 and violence/repression, 262, 263, 265, 266
Khorasan, 77, 80, 95, 103, 151
Ka’ba of Mecca, 71 Khorasani, Mohammad Kazem, 206–207
Kadivar, Mohsen, 274 Khorramites, 15, 83, 130
Karbala, 77, 124–125, 126–127, 173–175, Khosraw Anushirvan, 31, 59–60, 61–63
268, 287 Khosraw Parvez, 64–66
Karim Khan Zand, 166, 168, 169, 184, 253 Khosraw va Shirin (Nizami Ganjavi), 96
Kashani, Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem, 237, 240, Khwarezm, 100
245 Kiarostami, Abbas, 293
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340 Index

Kimiya-ye sa’a-dat, The Alchemy of Happiness Makhmalbaf, Moshen and Samira, 293
(al-Ghazali), 95 Malcolm, John, 171, 177, 178, 196
Al-Kindi, 81 Maleki, Khalil, 238
Kingship, Sassanid concept of, 57 Malkom Khan, 195, 196
Komitehs (revolutionary committees), 262 Al-Ma’mun, 80–81
Konya, 105 Mandaeans, 50
Kuchek Khan, 212, 218 Mani, 49–51
Kuh-e Nur diamond, 158, 165 Manichaeism, 49–53, 59
Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), 267 Al-Mansur, 79, 81
Kurds and Kurdistan, 161, 262–263 Mantiq al-tayr, The Conference of the Birds
(Attar), 97–100
Land reform, 242, 246 Marduk, 14, 25
Layla and Majnoun (Nizami Ganjavi), 96–97 Marja, 173, 207
Leonidas, 25 Marlowe, Christopher, 221
Lezges of Daghestan, 159–160, 181 Martyrdom, 267–268
Life expectancy, 276 Maryam Begum, 146, 147, 149
Literature Mashdad shrine, 137
banning of works by Hedayat, 225 Mashhad University, 255
great body had been created by fifteenth Mashruteh (constitution), 202–205, 264. See
century, 115 also Constitutional Revolution of
and shu’biyya movement, 79 1905–1911
under Reza Khan, 225–226 Masnavi of Rumi, 106
See also Poetry Massagetae, 15
Lotf Ali Khan Zand, 170–171 Maurice, Emperor, 63, 64
Love, 85, 96, 97, 98, 113, 116 Mazdaism, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15
and accession of Darius, 19–20
Macedon and Macedonians, 25, 26–30 and Ardashir, 44
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 90, 148 and Arsacids and Sassanids, 34
Macrinus, 43 becomes Zoroastrianism, 55
Madreseh tradition, 138, 140 and brotherhoods of fifteenth century,
Magi, 9, 15, 17–20, 50, 53 130
Magian wine (mey-e moghaneh), 93 codification of under Sassanids, 54–55
Mahmud Ghilzai, 150 and fire altars by Sassanids, 49
Majles or national assembly, 203–204, 206, influence on Judaism, 10
208, 211, 212, 231 and Manichaeism, 49, 50–51
and Anglo-Persian agreement of 1919, massacres at Ray and Istakhr by invading
216 Arabs, 75
attack upon by Mohammad Ali Shah, 207 and Mithraism, 41–42
blocked by hardliner elements during and Shahnameh, 86
Khatami presidency, 281 and shu’ubiyya movement, 79
and parties to support Mohammad Reza, systematic recording of texts of, 40
240, 250 See also Avesta; Zoroaster and
and Reza Khan, 219–220, 222, 224–225 Zoroastrianism
Schuster’s comments on, 210 Mazdak, 59, 60–61
and seats for minorities, 279 Mazdakism, 15, 59, 61, 83
under Khomeini constitution, 264 Mecca, 69, 70, 71, 123, 125–126
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Medes and Median Empire, 4–5, 12 Mohammad, 5, 68–71, 93–94, 126

Medina, 69–70 Mohammad Ali Shah, 206, 207, 208
“Mental reservation,” 128 Mohammad Baqer Majlesi, 144, 146, 147
Merv massacre, 100, 102 Mohammad Ghuri, 104
Mesopotamia, 2, 42 Mohammad Mizra, 181
Messiah, 8, 51, 129 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi
Migration, internal, 246 alienation of people towards, by 1977,
Military matters 254–255
and cavalry and dehqans, 60 appeal to US and public opinion during
and cavalry exercises of Nader, 153 WWII, 232
during Achaemenid empire, 26 assassination attempt against, 1949,
and expansion of army under Reza Shah, 234–235
222–223 assumption of throne, 230
of Fath Ali Shah no match for European and autocratic rule and repression, 243,
powers, 182–183 250–251, 252
and feminine approach, 28–29 background of, 230
and financial overextension, 184 demands from U.S. to liberalize, 242
and military revolution by Nader Shah, events of 1951–1953 alienated many
161–162 Iranians, 237, 238
and Mithraism, 41 incidents where he looked foolish,
and oil revenue and US aid, 239–240 255–256
and Parthian arrows, 34, 36 isolation of, 251
Roman tortoise/armor, 39, 40 leaves country in January 1979, 258
and Safavids, 135, 141 and Mossadeq coup, 240
and testing of Shahab III missile, 281 and pardoning of Sardari, 231
and use of horses by time of Darius III, and White Revolution reforms, 242
26 Mohammad Shah (Moghul emperor), 157, 158
Millspaugh, Arthur, 223, 232 Mohammad Shah (Persian ruler), 185–186,
Mind, empires of future are, 283 187, 188
Mind, Iranian Empire of, 120, 294 MOIS. See Ministry of Intelligence and
Ministry of Intelligence and Security Security (MOIS)
(MOIS), 265, 278, 279, 289. See also Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO),
SAVAK security agency 250, 266–267, 272
Mir Veis, 148–149 Mojtaheds, 172, 206–207, 254, 271
Mirza Agha Nuri, 192 Molla Sadra, 138
Mirza Hasan Shirazi, 197 Mongol period, 100–104, 101, 116–117
Mirza Hosein Khan, 194 cultural conquering of by Persians, 104,
Mirza Mahdi Astarabadi, 164–165 105
Mithra, 7 Montazeri, Ayatollah, 254, 272–273, 301
Mithradates I, Arsacid, 33, 34 Montazh, 250
Mithradates II (Mithradates the Great), 33, Moses, 5
34 Mossadeq, Mohammad, 224–225, 231, 235,
Mithraism, 40–43 236–237, 245
Mithras, 41 Motahhari, Mrteza, 263
Modarres, Seyyed Hasan, 224, 225, 264 Mottahedeh, Roy, 234, 250
Moghul Empire of India, 139, 157–158 Mousavi, Mir-Hosein, 296, 297–300
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342 Index

Mozzaffer od-Din, 199–200, 201, 203 Naser od-Din Tusi, 104

Mu’awiya (fifth caliph), 76, 126 Al-Nasser, Jamal Abd (Nasser), 238
Mullahs, 83, 140–141, 186, 196–197 Nassiri, General, 262
and attacks against Griboyedov, 182, 184 National Front, 235, 236, 240, 242, 254, 257
Khomeini criticism of closed-minded, 271 reforming and criticisms of 1977, 252, 253
Mu’tazilis, 82, 83, 95 National Intelligence Estimate of November
2007, 293
Nabonidus, 14 Nationalism, 117, 272
Nader Shah, 151–165, 156, 169, 219–220 Naus, Joseph, 200, 202
and attempt to conquer Daghestan, 160 Nebuchadnezzar, 9
and conquest of India, 157–158 Nehemiah, 25
conquests of and centrality of Persia, Neo-Platonists, 61–62, 94, 108, 138
158–159 Nero, 39
coronation of, 155 Nestorian Church, 57
and defeat of Afghans, 153–154, 157 New Julfa, 136
and defeat of Ottomans, 154–155 New Year celebration, 20
and military exercises, 152–153 Newspapers, 204, 232, 265
and movement against Ottoman Empire, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10, 53
160, 162, 163 Nima Yushij, 226
overstretching of resources of, 157, 160, Nizam ol-Mulk, Hasan Tusi, 90
162, 163 Nizami Ganjavi, 96–97
as parvenu, 161 Nomadic invaders, Ibn Khaldun’s theory of,
period before becoming Shah, 151–155 118–120
personal breakdown of, 160, 163 Nomadic peoples, 3–4
and religious tolerance, 157 Non-Iran (Aniran) territories, 45
reorientation towards Sunnism, 155, 157, Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 291
161 Nuclear weapons development, 301
style of ruling backward or forward declarations by religious leaders against,
looking, 160–161 273, 292
why not more well-known?, 163–164 dispute regarding Iranian, 291–293, 298
Najaf, 206–207, 287 fears regarding and Ahmadinejad threats,
Napoleon, 178, 179, 180, 183 286–287, 295
Naqsh-e Rostam rock relief, 44, 45, 46, 54 and intelligence that Iran stopped in
Narseh, 54 2003, 293
Naser-e Khosraw, 88 and Iranian diplomatic offer of 2003, 284
Naser od-Din Shah, 185, 188, 191–192, 197, Nuqtavi Sufis, 137
199, 243 Nuri, Shaykh Fazollah, 206, 208
assassination of, 198
and breaking off talks with British in Obama, Barack, 295–296, 300–301
1870s, 195 Odenathus, Septimius, 53–54
and British and Russian influence in Oil, 210
Persia, 192–193 and British, 226–227, 228, 235–236
and Malkom Khan, 196 and concession of 1901 to D’Arcy
ruling as own first minister, 192 (British), 200, 201
and tobacco concession, 197 demands for nationalization of by Majles,
traveling of, 194 235–236
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Index 343

discovered in Khuzestan, 212 Paradise, 16

increased income under Mohammad Parker, Geoffrey, 161
Reza Pahlavi, 239, 247 Parthian kings, as friends to the Greeks, 32
protection of fields in WWI, 213 Parthians, 4, 32–33, 34, 39
revenue of to military, 223 and battles with Rome, 34–40, 42–43
U.S. with stake in after Mossadeq coup, and Indo-Parthian empire in Punjab, 39
239 under Sassanids, 47
See also Anglo-Iranian Oil Company; Parthians and Sassanids, 35
Anglo-Persian Oil Company Pasargadae, 251
Old Stone Age inhabitants, 2 Peace of Paris, 192
Omar (caliph), 111 Pelagius and Pelagianism, 52, 53
Omar Khayyam, 90–93, 115, 116, 145 Perfect Man, 108, 260–261
OPEC, 247 Peroz (Feruz), 58
Original sin, 52 Persecution of minorities
Ormuzd (Ahura Mazda), 44 in 1830s, 186–187
Orodes, 37, 38 and Kerdir, 54
Osroes (Khosraw), 42 and Mohammad Reza Shah, 251–252
Ottoman Empire, 130, 137, 151, 203 and riots of 1903, 200
Nader Shah’s movement against, under Islamic Republic, 279–280
154–155, 160, 162, 163 under Safavids, 133–134, 139–140, 144
Persian cultural influence in, 138–139 and Yazdegerd II, 68
and war with the Safavids, 133, 136 Persepolis, 20, 25, 29, 251
and WWI, 213, 215 Persia, formal use of name, 226
Persia and the Persian Question (Curzon), 215
Pacorus, 38 Persian language
Pahlavi dynasty and language reform by Reza Shah, 226,
and development of military, 222–223 229
execution of senior figures by Komitehs, relationship to other languages, 1–2
262 and Shahnameh, 88
and exploitation of oil by British until survived Islamic conquest, 68
1993, 227 Persian/Russian wars of 1804–1828, 175, 177
formal beginning of in 1926, 219 Persian wars, 23, 25, 26
invented historical heritage for, 239, 251 Philip of Macedon, 27–28
oil boom and expansion of 1960s–1970s, Philip the Arab, 46
246–250 Phocas, 64
and political repression and remoteness, Phraates, 33, 34
229, 243, 250–251, 252–253 Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 8
powers limited during WWII, 231 Plato and Platonism, 9, 24, 108
and transport infrastructure, 223–224 Plotinus, 50
and Westernizing by Reza Shah, 226 Plutarch, 37
See also Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; Reza Poetry of Persia
Khan/Reza Shah al-Iraqi, Fakhroddin, 107–110
Pahlavi Foundation, 263 and Attar, 97–100
Pahlavi language, 48, 68 and courts of Abbasid dynasty, 84–85
Palestine, 230 culmination of after Arab conquest,
Panahi, Ja‘far, 293 105–116
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344 Index

Poetry of Persia, continued Qumran (Dead Sea) scrolls, 10

and earlier Arabic traditions, 85
eighteenth century rejection of Safavid Radio ownership, increase of in 1940s, 232
style, 225–226 Rafsanjani, Akbar Hashemi, 269, 274, 281,
grand theme is love, 85, 96, 97, 98, 113 298, 300
Hafez, 87, 112–115 and reconstruction, 274–276
homoerotic strain in, 107–108 Railways, 192–193, 195, 223–224
Kasravi’s disapproval of cult of, 233–234 Rashid al-Din, 117
and Nizami Ganjavi, 96–97 Rashidun, 132
and Omar Khayyam, 91–93 Rastakhiz (Resurgence) party, 250, 257
and Rumi, 105–107 Razm o bazm, 141–142
and Sa’di, 110–112 Razmara, Ali, 235
and Safavid or Indian period, 139 Reconstruction era, 274–276
and Sana’i, 95–96 Reform attempt by Khatami, 277–281, 284
and Shahnameh, 86–88 Refugees, after recent wars, 274
and Sufism, 97–100 Religious revolution, 18, 210
under Reza Khan, 225–226 and Abu Muslim, 77–78
verse forms of, 92 during Abbasid period, 83
Political societies (anjoman), 203–204 pattern of and Ardashir, 45
Polygamy, 136–137, 276 Revolution of 1979, 126, 256–258, 261
Population levels, 167, 222, 240, 275–276 Shi’a beliefs that are recipe for, 173
Press freedom, 265, 281 talk of exporting faded by end of
Protector of the Poor, 60 Iran/Iraq war, 267
Reuter, Baron de, and Reuter concession,
Qajar Persia, 136, 204, 219 194–195
and Agha Mohammad Khan, 169–172, Revolution of 1979, 126, 256–258, 261
176 Revolutionary Guard Corps (Sepah-e
and civil war with Zands, 169–171, 184 Pasdaran), 263, 268, 301
and Fath Ali Shah, 176–177, 182, 184, 185 Rex Cinema fire, 257
map of Persia, 183 Reza Khan/Reza Shah, 208, 221, 230, 244
and Mohammad Shah, 185–186, 187, assumes name Pahlavi in 1925, 219
188 becomes prime minister/shah, 219–220
Qalandar, 97, 107 as commander of Cossack Brigade, 217
Qanun (newspaper), 196, 198 desire for Western look in
Qara-Qoyunlu, 120–121 dress/attitudes, 226
Qezelbash, 131, 132, 133, 134, 141 few friends as WWII began, 227
and Abbas the Great, 135, 136, 137 and Nazis/fascism, 222, 228, 229
and Nader Qoli, 151 purpose to make Iran strong, 222
Qom, 202, 287 strengthened his own position, 224–225
Qor’an, 69, 70, 80, 82, 87, 115 taking over/reforming central
and mystical element, 93 government, 218
and shu’ub, 79 visit to Atatürk in 1934, 226
similarities to Zoroastrianism, 74–75 Reza Pahlavi (son of last Shah), 287
and veil, 190 Reza Qoli Mirza, 159, 160, 164, 165
and women, 71 Rome
Qorrat al-Ain, 188, 189 and Mithraism, 41–42
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Index 345

and Parthians, 33, 34–40, 42–43 Safavi, Navvab, 233

and peace during time of Yazdegerd Safavids, 121, 130–144
I/Arcadius, 56–57 and Abbas the Great, 134–141
and Sassanid Empire, 45–46, 53, 55–56 Afghan invasion of, 148–151
See also Byzantium and alcohol, 141–142, 143
Rostam, 37, 38 and battles with Sunni Ottomans, 133,
Roxana, 29 136
Rudaki, 85–86 Esma’il and establishment of empire,
Rumi, Jalal al-Din Molavi, 105–107, 116, 132–134
238–239 extremism and persecution of religious
Rural population improvements, 276 groups, 133–134, 139–140, 144, 147
Rushdie, Salman, 270, 273 functioning without strong monarchs,
Russia 143–144
as allies of Nader, 155 governmental system of, 130, 137–138
and attempted return of captives in and military and gunpowder, 135, 141
1829, 182 and religious rules and Shah Hosein,
ending of influence after 1953 coup, 237 146–147
and firing on shrine of Emam Reza, 212 and Shah Soleiman, 142–143, 144,
and interference during Naser-od-Din’s 145–146
reign, 193–194 and Shah Sultan Hosein, 146–148
and loans to Persia under Mozaffar od- and Shi’a, 131, 132
Din, 199–200, 201 and Sufis, 130, 131, 140, 147
and military forced removal of Schuster, Saffarids of Sistan, 84
209 Sakae tribe, 32, 33, 38
and occupation of Iran in WWII, Salisbury, Lord, 185, 195
227–234 Samanids of Bokhara, 84, 85–86, 117
and Persian/Russian wars of Sana’i, 95–96
1804–1828, 175, 177 San’an, Shaykh, 98–100
represented traditional European order Sanctuary (bast), 202
in nineteenth century, 193 Sanei, Grand Ayatollah Yousef, 273
revolution destroyed trade with Persia, Sanjabi, Karim, 252, 253, 257
214 Saoshyant, 8, 129
rivals with British in Persia, 187 Sarbedari movement, 117, 130
and secessionist movements in Sardari Qajar, Abdol-Hosein, 230–231
Azerbaijan during WWII, 232–233 Sassanid Empire, 43–62
and successor to Fath Ali Shah, 185–186 changes in government made by, 47–48
and treaty of 1907, 207–208 and creation of nobility or dehqans, 48
withdrawal from Iran, 234 and Iranian identity, 117
and WWI, 213–214 Khosraw’s rule as pinnacle of, 62–63
See also Caucasus and king as protector of justice for all
subjects, 57
Saddam Hossein, 266, 267, 274, 289 and nobility and clergy during reigns of
Sa’di, 110–112 Kavad and Khosraw, 59–60
Sadr, Abol-Hasan Bani, 265 and non-Iranian territories, 45
Al-Sadr, Moqtada, 287 prefiguring of policies of with
Sadr al-Din, 130 Vologases I, 40
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346 Index

Sassanid Empire, continue Shahrvaraz, 65, 66

and Rome, 45–46, 53, 55–57 Shalmaneser III, King of Assyria, 4
under Ardashir and Shapur, 43–49 Shams-e Tabrizi, 105, 107
and use of name Iran, 45 Shapur I, 46, 47–49, 50, 54, 55
Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie), 270, 273 Shapur II, 55–56, 134
Satraps, 21 Shari’a law, 204, 253, 264
Sattar Khan, 208 Shariati, Ali, 255
Al-Saud family of Arabia, 175–176 Shari’atmadari, Ayatollah, 256, 257, 263–264
Saudi Arabia, 288 Shaykh Junayd, 130
SAVAK security agency, 240, 242, 243, 255, Shaykh Safi, 130
265 Shaykhism, 188, 198
execution of head of by Komitehs, 262 Shi‘ism and Shi’a tradition
and pursuit of dissidents/radical and Akhbari/Usuli debate, 172–173, 175
movements, 246, 250 and Ali as Mohammad’s successor, 125,
and Rex Cinema fire, 257 126
See also Ministry of Intelligence and criticism by Kasravi and others, 233
Security (MOIS) and death of eleventh Emam, 129
Schuster, Morgan, 209–210, 223 and Emams as legitimate leaders/Perfect
Science, Islamic, 198 Man, 127, 260–261
Scythian tribes, 5 establishment in Iran with Esma’il and
Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), British, 237 Safavids, 132
Security, 148 globally, and Iranian-style Islamic rule,
Seleucid kings, 30–33 287
Seleucus, 30 and illegitimacy of secular authority,
Seleucus Nicator, 31–32 172–173
Seljuk Turks empire, 89, 90, 96, 100, 104 and independence of Iraqi/worldwide
Sennacherib, King of Assyria, 12–13, 14, 15 Shi’a traditions, 287
September 11, 2001, 284 and indignation at arrogance of power,
Seven Years’ War, 158, 160 285
Sexuality, 15, 50, 51, 52, 249–250 Iranians as protectors for elsewhere, 287
Seyyed, 202, 243–244 and Ismaili sect, 128
Seyyed Ali Mohammad, 188 larger than current Iranian religious
Shabestari, Mohammad Mojtahed, 274 leadership, 273–274
Shabestari (poet), 109 and Mu’tazili thinking, 83
Shah Abd ol-Azim, shrine of, 193, 198, and “object of emulation” (marja-e taqlid),
201–202, 206 173
Shah Soleiman, 142–143, 144, 145–146, 148 origins of, 77, 123–129
Shah Sultan Hosein, 146–148, 149, 150, 151 and political loyalty required in 1990s, 271
Shahab III missile, 281 and quietism, 128
Shahabadi, Mirza Mohammad Ali, 244 and religious revolution, 173
Shahid Balkhi, 67, 86 and repression of women and female
Shahnameh (Ferdowsi), 37–38, 85, 251 sexuality, 277
content and great influence of, 86–88 restoration of by Karim Khan Zand, 168
and Persian continuity, 68 and sarbedari, 117
Shahrokh (grandson of Nader), 161, 166, 171 and schism with Sunni Islam, 125,
Shahrokh (son of Timur), 120, 161 127–128
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Index 347

self-image as betrayed and humiliated, Supreme National Security Council, 289

127 Suren, 37, 39
and Shariati, 255 Susa, 20
and Sufism, 95 Swedish gendarmerie, 208, 213
and sympathy for oppressed, 127, 173 Syncretism, of Persian regime, 21
and taqiyeh or dissimulation, 128
Twelver Shi‘ism, 129, 132 Al-Tabari, 59, 81
See also Ashura; Hosein; Karbala Tabataba’i, Seyyed Mohammad, 201, 202,
Shu’ubiyya movement, 79–80, 117 203, 206, 207, 231
Silk trade, 33, 119, 135 Tabataba’i, Seyyed Zia, 218
Al-Sistani, Grand Ayatollah Ali, 287 Tabriz, 103, 132, 205, 207–208
Siyasat-Nameh, 90 Taherids of Khorasan, 84, 85
Sogdians, 4, 32 Tahmasp, 134, 142, 151–152, 153, 154, 159
Sohravardi, 94, 138, 270 Taj-e Mah jewel, 158, 171
Solomon, Temple of, 9 Takht-e Soleiman, 65
Soltaniyeh, 104 Taleqani, Ayatollah, 254
Soroush, Abdolkarim, 271–272 Taliban, 284, 289
South Persia Rifles, 213 Tanker War, 268–269
Sparta, 25, 27 Taqiyeh or dissimulation, 128
Strangling of Persia, The (Schuster), 210 Taqizadeh, Seyyed Hasan, 205, 207, 208, 225
Succession, difficulties regarding, 136–137 Taylor Prism, 12–13
Sufism, 83, 93–95 Ta’zieh, 173, 174
and alcohol, 141 Tbilisi, 171
complexity of and Safavids, 131 Tehran, 169, 230, 246, 248, 276
and conflict with ulema, 94, 95 Tehran University, 243, 254
eleventh/twelfth centuries and spreading Tepe Sialk, 2
Islam, 94–95 Teymurtash, Minister, 227
and Majnoun, 97 Thaïs, 29
and Mohammad Shah, 187 Timur (Tamerlane), 112–113, 161
and mystical experience, 93–94 Timurid Empire, 116–121
and obedience to Master (pir), 131 Tobacco concession to British in 1890,
poetry of, 95–100 196–197
Safavid eclipsing/persecuting, 134, 140, Tolerance
147 and Abbasids, 80
and sharbedari, 117 by Arabs after conquest, 74
and Sunnism and Shi‘ism, 95 and civil rights and 1906 constitution,
Suicide bombing, 273 204
Sulla, 33 and Constantine as protector of
Sultan Mohammad, 100 Christians everywhere, 55
Sumerians, 2 and Cyrus, 14–15
Sunnism and Darius, 21
and Nader Shah, 155, 157, 168 in later Sassanid period, 56
persecution of in late Safavid time, 147 and Parthians, 33–34
and schism with Shi’a, 125, 127–128 shown by Shapur, 47, 50
and Sufism, 95 under Nader Shah, 157
and Timur, 118 and Yazdegerd I, 57
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348 Index

Tomyris, Queen, 15 and recent dissent from regime party line,

Towers of Silence, 16 274
Trajan, 42 and reforms of Reza Shah, 227
Transoxiana, 80, 100, 102, 118 relationship to government in Safavid
Transport infrastructure, 223–224, 274 period, 140–1, 144
Treaty of 1801, 178, 179 and status of women in Islamic Republic,
Treaty of Finckenstein of 1807, 179 277
Treaty of Friendship and Alliance, 180 Umayyad dynasty, 76–77, 124, 127
Treaty of Turkmanchai, 181–182, 186, 226 Unemployment, 285, 286
Treaty of Zohab, 141 United Nations Security Council, 291
Tribes United States
and conscription, 223 and Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, 284
Reza Khan overcoming, 218 buying F–14 fighters from, 247
and role of women before 1900, 189–190 coup of 1953 and ally of Pahlavi regime
situation of in eighteen century, 167–168 after, 236, 237–238, 240
still active in Qajar state, 183, 214 and economic sanctions of Iran and Iraq,
and tribute, 168 275
Troubadour tradition, 88 election of 2008 and Iranian policy, 295
Tsitsianov (Russian general), 178–179 and Gulf War in 1991, 274
Tudeh, pro-Communist party, 229, 232, 233, and help to Iran of early 1900s, 209
234, 238 hostage of Embassy diplomats and 1979
arrested by SAVAK, 246, 254 Revolution, 258, 261, 265–266
banning of in 1983, 267 immunity to U.S. military and loan in
and oil nationalization movement, 236 1964, 243
Turkey and Turkish, 90, 159, 222. See also and Iran/Contra affair, 269, 273
Ottoman Empire and Iranian diplomatic offer of 2003, 284
Tuyul lands, 135 and Iranian reaction after 9/11, 284–285
Twelver Shi’as, 129, 132 Iranian resistance to values of, 249, 283
Iranian liking and respect for, 285
Ulema Jewish emigration to, 279
Abbas support of, 137 and military aid from 1953–63, 240
Al-e Ahmad’s criticism of, 239 and more advisors in 1946, 234
as authoritative arbitrators in crisis, 120 and occupation of Iran in WWII, 230, 233
and Babi movement, 188 and oil boycott of early 1950s, 236
and conflict with Sufis, 94, 95 as possible hope to Iran after WWI, 215
and constitutional revolution, 204, and possible talks with Iran about Iraq,
205–207, 208 288–289
and four schools of Sunnism, 82–83 resumption of diplomatic relations and
as judges under Khomeini, 264 Khatami, 278
and Khomeini and velayat-e faqih, self-aggrandizing presence of in 1970s
253–254, 263–264, 273 Iran, 248–249
and land reform, 242 and sharing stake in oil after Mossadeq
and Mohammad Reza Shah, 254 coup, 239
and Mohammad Shah and Sufism, 187 and shooting down of Iranian airliner in
and mojtaheds, 172 1988, 268–269
parallel culture to Abbasid court culture, Uranium enrichment, 291–292
82–83 Urdu language, 105, 139
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Index 349

USS Vincennes, 268–269 schools for and banning of veil by Reza

Usulis, 172–173, 253 Shah, 226
Uzun Hasan, 131 and suffrage as part of White Revolution,
242
Valerian, Emperor, 46–47, 53 under Achaemenids, 15–16
Vatatzes, Basile, 152–153 within Islamic Republic, 189, 276–277
Veil, 71, 190–191, 226, 265, 276 See also Veil
Velayat-e faqih, 253–254, 264, 271, 273, 277, 287 World War I, 213–214, 215
Ventidius, Publius, 38 World War II, 227–234
Vologases I (Valkash), 40 Writer’s Association, 253
Wu Ti, 33
Wahhabis, 95
Wahhabism, 175–176 Xerxes (Khashayarsha), 25
Warfare. See Military matters
Wassmuss, Wilhelm, 213–214 Yazdegerd I, 56–57
Western influence Yazdegerd II, 58
and constitutional revolution, 205, 206, 210 Yazdegerd III, 66, 72
and Europeans’ visits during reign of Fath Yazdi, Ebrahim, 253, 267
Ali Shah, 176, 177 Yazdi, Masbah, 298
Iranian resistance to values of since 1979, Yazdi, Mohammad Kazem, 207
283 Yazid (caliph), 124, 126, 133
Westernizing of Iran, 226, 241 Yermolov (Russian general), 181
Westoxication (gharbzadegi), 238 Young Ottomans, 203
What Is the Religion of the Hajiis with Warehouses?
(Kasravi), 233 Zahedi, General, 236, 237, 240
White Revolution, 242, 254, 271 Zands, 169–171, 184
Wild Duck (Ibsen), 112 See also Karim Khan Zand; Lotf
Wilson, Woodrow, 215 Ali Khan
Wine, 96, 107, 113–114, 142 Zarathustra. See Zoroaster
Wolfowitz, Paul, 287 Zenobia, 53–54
Women Zoroaster and Zoroastrianism, 5–10, 16,
arrests of in 2007, 289 59–60, 61
expanded importance in workplace in and heavenly beings or entities (angels),
Islamic Republic, 277 8–9
and Khorramites, 83 and Islamic conquest, 67, 74
and Mohammad and Qor’an, 71 and negative accounts of Alexander, 30
and Nader Shah, 157 and similarities to Qor’an, 74–75
political societies for, 204 transition to from Mazdaism with
and Qorrat al-Ain, 188, 189 codification of Avesta, 55
restricted role of is a twentieth-century See also Avesta; Mazdaism
innovation, 189, 190, 191 Zurvan and Zurvanism, 8, 49